I agree with the premise, but I'm unsatisfied with the solutions offered. I've worked on both C code and model based designs in Simulink and other more purpose

I agree with the premise, but I'm unsatisfied with the solutions offered. I've worked on both C code and model based designs in Simulink and other more purpose built tools for safety critical embedded systems. First off I can't agree with the notion that programmers don't care about the system. They do. A lot. Especially the good ones. You can't do any meaningful work without caring about the system you're working on. But like in any profession you have some useless people. Second on MBD. In my opinion it leads to much more complex code, especially because the people writing the code aren't coders anymore. Or they don't see themselves as such. You say the people crafting the requirements are now speaking the same language as the coders? I say we've siloed people working on requirements from the actual coders now, which leads to exactly the coders having no clue about the requirements, and the requirements engineers having no clue what their model based changes do to the software. MBD is the worst reason I've seen for spaghetti code making it mainstream. MBD promotes spaghetti simply because it's so much easier to tack on more and more complexity without a serious understanding of what it does to code. Another thing is that I find MBD often harder to read than code. I can't really point to hard evidence, but I have a good analogy here in terms of UX. If code is like Google, MBD is like Bing's 2D tiling. It's much easier for a human to parse a list of statements, than statements that are all over the place. I think if we did meaningful research here, we'd get the same result for MBD vs code. We still shouldn't give up to look for better ways to code, but I think the better ways are easier to use programming languages that preserve the general purposeness of programming, better interactive environments (like F# interactive, Python REPL, etc.) and helpful syntax highlighting and better code annotation systems. Maybe live rendering of markdown and explanatory pictures in the IDE would be a helpful first step.