The whole concept of the effect strips is mostly historical. Most users are better off simply setting individual clips to use a certain blend mode, and they also should probably use modifiers to adjust colors and do effects.
Yes, most users.
But we are talking design so we need to think about edge cases.
Effects strips are non-standard and also usually annoying, since they clutter up the timeline very quickly. We could simply decide to remove them altogether.
Not sure if we could do it simply as well.
Thing is that there are 3 stages of processing:
Modifiers and most properties (scaling, crop, etc) are applied in preprocessing stage.
Effects are applied after that stage.
Blending and opacity is allpied in compositing stage.
As a programmer, this is quite awful, and I would like to linearize this process.
As low end user I would be OK with using modifiers to do all what I need, because I don’t need to do much.
If I want to go crazy however, I would hate using modifiers even more than effects. Nodes would be nice here…
So yes, we could get rid of effect strips, but we need a usable replacement for “go crazy” mode.
I would advocate for possibility of using node editor, because I could then rewrite whole pipeline as nodes and use linear process under the hood.
Having possibility to make my node setup as reusable template can make workflows faster and timeline cleaner.
This is Idea that I am brewing in my head for quite some time, but I don’t think that now is the time to realize it.