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