@dceejay this is actually why I requested the change to the serial node way back, Dynamically change characters expected in serial request , because node-red-contrib-modbus does not queue serial messages correctly. I wanted to pass a serial message and the number of return message bytes to expect to the serial request node.
Modbus is so simple that it does not take much at all on top of the serial or TCP nodes to cover about 95% of Modbus real-world use cases.