I find the compositor’s backdrop feature one of the weirdest Blender features.
Personally, I never NEVER want my nodes getting in the way of viewing the output. There’s a reason why no other compositing software does it this way. Blender is blindly following the mantra of never having overlapping UI elements – a lot of useful features/patches sadly died already because of this (clickable Breadcrumbs navigation of node hierarchy, Minimap for the node editors, …) – all less intrusive – but somehow Blender violates this principle the most with this background-overlay-nodes feature. If it didn’t exist already a patch for this would never survive code review and get approved.
I can live with it being an option though, just please do not enforce this weird view option (update the compositing workspace to not use this as default).
To make Blenders compositor getting more aligned with actual VFX production needs there are more fundamental problems anyway:
- no concept of overscan
- no possibility of holding mulitple layers of data in a stream (not just rgba)
- no concept of time (for a frame shift/offset node for example)