I've been using GV for coming up on a decade and it has the same problem that Dia has - you can tell it was made by engineers. In the same way you can look at code written by a UX guy and just know it wasn't written by someone formally educated in CS, the converse applies when engineers try to do UI.* Engineers historically just cared about the functionality - e.g., "Does this UML depict the information as precisely as possible? OK. Good. Next problem."
You saw the same problems with XFree86 WM/DEs. I spent months trying to get XFCE to be perfect in the late '00s, but it just always looked off. I'm a keyboard-consoler 98% of the time anyways, so staying in my `screen' instance was fine (in fact preferable,)with a nicely configured Konsole (or was it aterm, or did E17 have it's own Term? One of those..) full-screened. But such is the folly of projects like DIA and GV. It's getting better as NYT and all end up hiring people who have multi-disciplinarian abilities (I think Square or AirBNB open-sourced their dashboard which has a lot of good vis tools) but I really just want a standard, declarative language I can embed in Pandoc that looks good whether I export to PDF, HTML or print it.
*LaTeX not withstanding. Knuth brilliantly applied mathematical rules to typesetting and I maintain it still beats out InDesign in certain scenarios, granted I've heard many-a-grad-student's yells of frustration as they try to embed their results into a .tex, so YMMV. Look at this TeX and I defy anyone to tell me it's not pretty:
https://bloerg.net/2014/09/20/a-modern-beamer-theme.html
Sure, but that's like saying "you can tell HTML was made by engineers". In both cases the defaults with 0 styling applied aren't pretty. But also like HTML, Graphviz gives you the tools to customize the colors, fonts, edge and node styles and pretty much anything visual using style attributes, and just let GraphViz deal with its core competency of node layout. It takes some work up front to get a style template that you like and works for the type of display you're going for, but once you've figured out a palette and the shapes you want you can apply them to any Graphviz graph.
It would be nice though if someone made a "Twitter Bootstrap for Graphviz" that at least starts you off with some prettier defaults. :)
That's true, but saying "It's fully customizable, so you should still be able to do whatever you want with GraphViz" is like saying "it's a Turing-complete language, so you should still be able to do whatever you want with $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE" - technically true, but in practice, not so much.
You saw the same problems with XFree86 WM/DEs. I spent months trying to get XFCE to be perfect in the late '00s, but it just always looked off. I'm a keyboard-consoler 98% of the time anyways, so staying in my `screen' instance was fine (in fact preferable,)with a nicely configured Konsole (or was it aterm, or did E17 have it's own Term? One of those..) full-screened. But such is the folly of projects like DIA and GV. It's getting better as NYT and all end up hiring people who have multi-disciplinarian abilities (I think Square or AirBNB open-sourced their dashboard which has a lot of good vis tools) but I really just want a standard, declarative language I can embed in Pandoc that looks good whether I export to PDF, HTML or print it.
*LaTeX not withstanding. Knuth brilliantly applied mathematical rules to typesetting and I maintain it still beats out InDesign in certain scenarios, granted I've heard many-a-grad-student's yells of frustration as they try to embed their results into a .tex, so YMMV. Look at this TeX and I defy anyone to tell me it's not pretty: https://bloerg.net/2014/09/20/a-modern-beamer-theme.html