Comment by mccoyb

Just reflecting on my own comment -- what one might want is an automated layout system with a simple "natural language"-like API (perhaps similar to Penrose, although it's been awhile since I looked at that project).

Hardened and long use systems like TikZ of course, do have something like this -- but in complex TikZ graphics, you end up with a mixture of "right of" and "left of" (etc) and low-level manual specification, which I think tends to fall into the zone of issues.