I think your solution is clearly a better implementation.

I think MS in particular has sometimes just fallen short when polishing off the UI implementation of otherwise good ideas which is why I think people like Apple and Google have managed to gain grounds in emerging markets their UIs tend to be smoother albeit more general. I do believe in the principle behind their ideas though and frequently use the diagramming tool albeit often editing generated syntax afterwards.

I always find it slightly amusing when people separate text from graphics/diagrams - in a very real sense they are one and the same. Maybe we just need time for the really valuable non text gui principles to be established we benefit from the ground rules for text which have been established over 3,000 years of history.

I had a look at the new features of Data Explorer in Excel 2013 at the weekend and they're introducing multiple tabs marked things like Query / Pivot table / Data mining etc. Excel is becoming a query editor. They're even introducing a new hybrid query language - M - Personally I would have liked them to align any query language in Excel with TSQL and I would like to have very clear deliniation between textual query editor and the associated graphical editor which generates that text and not multiple variations of a couple of ideas. Similarly aligning the query editor in Access with TSQL always seemed like a good idea. To some extent the departments in MS struggle to coordinate things sometimes.