OK, I did a little in Stage, and here's what I was able to come up with:
I wasn't able to get a Stage view, so I don't know if that's operator error or if DMD doesn't have one. I'll do my best to recall what I though could be better.
- A more orthodox vertical flow of control vs. DL's horizontal.
- Having all the stages in one large ladder window seems less intuitive than just displaying the contents of of one stage that you click on or navigate to in the overview.
- Showing the jumps/transitions inside the stage ladder vs segregated at least a little bit seems less clear. Also, I can't remember if they showed on the stage view. Would prefer similar treatment. If you set the cursor on a transition, have just that transition in it's own window.
- Can't remember how or if the DL Stage view handled divergences and convergences, iirc that may have been one of the things that didn't work well. I'm old, bad memory.
- Lighting up active stages seemed like it worked optimally. Maybe for converging stages, light up the transition tick as well as or instead of the stage square if that stage is done and waiting on the others to converge.
Bottom line was that, for me at least, the stage view was less intuitive at showing overall flow of control though the program than the industry standard-ish. Ironically, the diagrams in the help topics for stage are based on the conventional presentation, like this:
