Diagrams is a great drag-and-drop tool, but drag-and-drop tools shouldn't be used for serious system diagramming: https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/its-time-to-drop-drag-an...

I completely agree with the sentiment of that post.

I've generally always found it difficult to find something in this space that produces a layout that's easy to follow, and easy to experiment with.

I think I'd like something that had: - layout constraints similar to the android relative layout - something like excalidraw that could dump the hand drawn diagram out to code for a bit of cleanup before going into VCS

I'm imagining you could solve the ability to inject new sections with the constraints relatively easily but still retain a good amount of creative control to better tell the story.

Any suggestions for tools to checkout?

It's a slight tangent but as an Obsidian user, the Obsidian-Excalidraw plugin^1 is kind of jaw-droppingly, amazingly good at combining the many things each tool does well into a seamless, customizable UX.

1. https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin