Hi,
as waveform said and completly understood, PlayMaker is not a visual scripting tool, it's a very specific paradigm to design interaction. Bolt, Bolt 2, and Unity visual scripting attempt are all missing the point of what artists expects, because it comes from a developer perspective. Which is why Alex really was blessed on the day he figured out PlayMaker and how it should function.
It's indeed the fact that PlayMaker is a wrapper of code snippets ( Actions), combines with an FSM visual editor, for linking states, events and data together. It is a very unique take. and I don't see any solution so far that understood and implemented properly a direct competitor.
the very strength of PlayMaker is also its weakness, because it means actions have to be written manually, because they are more than mere visual representation of an api end point or method, this means Unity will NEVER go that way because it can not scale automatically and requires a lot of human resources to keep updating and creating new actions. so Unity will never be able to create an intuitive visual scripting because it would either rely on reflections for everything and be completly bad for perfs, or it would need to be on the same level as scripting because it has to expose all api, and so you end with a one to one relationship between the visual representation of a code and it's c# counter part, which implies you need to know how to code, period... It may makes things prettier and less prone to typos, but it essentially boils down to this.
Now, the real danger as some might have spotted already is exposure on the Asset store which seems to be tampered to promote other visual scripting environment, which is fine in itself, however the strong user base and the sheer amount of resources available on the internet is compensating for now.
Bye,
Jean