Nodes are awkward legacy, they should be hidden and not affect anything. All new tools we've been adding recently go in this direction: Tweak tool does not care about nodes; Spiros use nodes but they are much less clumsy than bezier nodes and easier to move around

Beziers are clumsy, that's true. At this point I'd like to advertise my patch [1] which introduces automatic maintained handles. I think such nodes are even more intuitive than Spiro splines, and they still can be mixed with normal smooth/cusp nodes in the same path.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/255049

Regards, Thomas