This is going to be a little off-topic and also not even related to Node-RED but ....
I've recently started doing more BabylonJS "stuff", i.e., creating a particular 3D scene for a particular device, for a specific reason.
What I have discovered is that programmatic 3D is extremely complex. Using something like Blender to create 3D scenes is visual and hence (arguably) simpler to understand and get productive in. But coding 3D scenes and their interactions is really (for me anyway) complex. What makes it complex? Event handlers, observers, 3D shapes, 3D collision, physics, renders, shaders and everything else - the terminology. Then you need to understand the architecture of BabylonJS - how do the parts interact and interlink. What is the relationship between shaders, textures, materials, shapes, lights and cameras?
Fast forward: to create my "scene" what I had in mind, took some 2500 lines of JS code plus understanding 3D physics, memory management and all the above. That was three weeks of work and about three questions in the BabylonJS forum. I admit it's not a run & jump or anything particularly mainstream but more complex than rendering a Node-RED flow in 3D (which is also BabylonJS).
The point here is what made it possible that I was productive and never stuck creating something that I didn't know before?
For me, what made this possible is the BabylonJS playground where it is possible not only to create a fully functioning three-D scene in the browser using BabylonJS (i.e. I can test my code there first before entering a edit-save-deploy-test cycle), but it is also possible to save that code and post a link to it in their forum.
So that others can load that code, change that code and then save their changes (with a revision number) and repost their modifications in the forum. All that without having to login to the playground, no signup, no hassle, no installation, no server and all in their favourite browser. So the turn around for getting help is super quick: question + link to playground, someone opens link, changes code, saves code and posts their fix in the forum.
So the BabylonJS community has grown around a collection of examples linked stored the playground. The documentation is full of examples hosted in the playground that anyone can then modify, save and repost in the forum as part of a question. Or simply integrate into their own solution.
And because examples are extremely focused on the problem at hand, examples are easy to understand. And finally, as an added bonus, the developers of BabylonsJS have a huge repository of examples that people are using and have created for their needs - because they created them in the playground. This makes for regression testing for new releases ultra simple - just update the libraries of the playground and test all examples.
Imagine doing the same with Node-RED code - be it dashboard or flow code.
For newbies a vast repository of examples would suddenly be available to learn from.
Helping others would not require getting someone to post their flow here, then having to copy that flow data into a local running instance of Node-RED, analysing the flow and then suggesting a fix. Instead someone could go to the playground.nodered.org, recreate their flow there and then post a link to it here.
A vast repository of code would be generated that can help to test new versions.
I personally would say that Node-RED requires something similar because the complexity of flow based visual programming is the same (if not higher) that programmatically coding 3D scenes using JS in the browser.
