Visual programming excels at data wrangling (parsing structured data in an input/output pipeline that spits the same filtered data in a new format and structure

Visual programming excels at data wrangling (parsing structured data in an input/output pipeline that spits the same filtered data in a new format and structure). You're right that until now its usage has been limited to domain-specific languages for automating applications. But with the emergence of functional programming in the mainstream and visual tools that follow that paradigm, I predict that soon there will be visual tools that allow quite general programming. (I've already seen working prototypes, and they deliver on most of the promises).