I love home assistant, but find the automation subsystem to be lacking in both ease of configuration and features.
I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1].
It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files.
I hadn't seen that before, but I don't think it addresses my biggest problem with HA automations: it's not a GUI.
When I'm developing my automations I often need to do a lot of testing and debugging when things don't work as expected.
I find that Node-RED allows me to do this extremely easily as I can click on nodes and see what values are being passed around, and what state things are in.
AppDaemon would be great for that, as the callback methods it requires for listening to state changes or scheduled timer can be independently unit tested and debugged.
Automation is an area of pretty active development. While visual workflows aren't a thing in HA, you definitely don't need to write yaml in order to create automations. The UI has supported it for quite some time (and is quite usable, in my opinion).
There's some NLP involved since the latest version got released (0.102), so you can just type some simple automation like "turn off lights when I leave home".
Powered by Stanford's Almond, which you can install yourself, as an Hassio addon, or use the cloud version: https://almond.stanford.edu/
I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1].
It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files.
[0]: https://nodered.org/ [1]: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assista...