Hi Mekjal,
Everything you said was as if I wrote them lol. I started out with PM about 5 years ago and have tried much of other visual scripting tools as well along the way, including the bolt. I actually ended up learning c# in order to cover some short comings of Playmaker, and now, I find myself using both, but I still try to do in Playmaker as much as I can. My thoughts on Playmaker and Bolt are exactly the same.
While I appreciated Bolt's efforts and its development, ultimately, it's still more or less a pure visual scripting, with you manually having to set up and do the same work flow as if you are just writing c#. It felt like just a nice organizer for your scripting (although I haven't used their state machine approach much). I love playmaker because I can just concentrate on making the gameplays a lot easier. Also it's extremely fast to work with (I personally can't stand other visual scripting tool's compiling time every time you make any changes or edit).
I can second everything you said, including the visual aesthetic of the Playmaker could most definitely use some updates. :]
My own wish list from Playmaker if I may add here, are
1. More improvements on grouping and organizing (I'm particularly careful about having too many variables everywhere). I find one of the most common short comings of Playmaker is overblown amount of variables and states machines to keep track of.
2. More sophisticated use of Playmaker in the community and tutorial materials.
I understand most of the Playmaker documentations and videos were about helping new users into the use of Playmaker. I most certainly started using Playmaker to see if I can just quickly make a game prototype, or at the most, just make a simple casual game on it. But more I work with it, the more I appreciate its strength, and I feel like it's most definitely capable of making more complex games. When I actually found out how to use "run FSM" and "Array Get Next" etc properly few years back. it leveled me up and allowed me to build far more complex and sophisticated mechanics.
In the playmaker ecosystem, the focus is still only about getting users into using the playmaker and making prototype or simple games only. The ecosystem also needs a proper "leveling up" focus, about making more full blown complex games, for many Playmaker users to advance to.
3. Along the line of previous points, I also feel like the playmaker ecosystem could start taking more mature solutions built in for full game products. I sincerely believe the Playmaker allows a completely different types of *developers* to rise. Honestly, Playmaker does more for the Unity on their own Moto of "Democratizing Development of Games" than the Unity themselves. Traditional sense of Developers were purely just programmers. Tools like Playmaker allows Artists and Writers to become a developer, if they just add little more efforts. I myself come from technical art background, rather than computer science. And those new types of developers love how Playmaker just allow them to build games while the playmaker takes care of semantics and syntaxes.
But at the tail end of any developments, there are usually few things that's just missing. Security of data for one, is a problem. No developer ever wants people to be able to simply cheat by default. No-one wants their game's cool time to be simply bypassed by the user just changing the device time in the device settings. But yet, the entire ecosystem treats timer, security, user data, as an after thoughts. Many of security questions in the message board usually are met with "Don't worry about it for now, because when your game is fun, then get the funding and built it properly with proper developer to handle those issues". I don't mean the Playmaker has to provide the perfect security solution. But I don't believe the end of all Playmaker project is to "Just don't worry about it, this is just a prototype" nor "Now you can just find some assets and change everything" by default. That means problems with storing user data on a playerpref, using simple device timer, not having any encryption method for user data, etc should be replaced with more solid solution by default IMO.
TL;DR, in the end, I truly believe Playmaker hit something with a large segments of game developing community, and would really love to see it evolve into more full complete solution for many new brews of developers and new games to come.