I’m going to preface this by saying I THINK I’m for the added complexity.
I’m not as big of a power user when it comes to beveling, but I think having the extra options is probably a good idea. As you said, there is something inherent about bevel that brings up many different scenarios. It’s just a complicated tool, period.
That being said, its less the added functionality, and more the increased space that the modifier now takes that is what is a concern I think. One, it’s a bit unwieldy as a modifier, two, we are worried that starting users - intermediate users will feel overwhelmed by bevel, no? I can understand that, but I think this might bleed a bit into a everything nodes discussions.
As a node, not a modifier, all this added functionality will likely feel a bit easier to work with. And when it comes to parametric modelling all the added functionality will absolutely be welcome; you never know what you need when it comes to that.
The only problematic point that I heavily consider is how, in the future, we will decide to display the nodes. Blender has a tendency to expose all the elements in a node for easy access (shading, compositer). While this has its ups and downs, on the whole I like it because blenders nodes aren’t usually too big, and exposing all the parameters doesn’t take up too much space, plus it allows feeding parameters into one another very easily. That’s all great for procedural modelling. But when it comes to bevel, it may infact still be a hilariously large node…
That brings up the discussion of maybe having the nodes be closed, and their parameters be brought up in something like the N panel, which we already can. This way we could probably consider tabs and the likes to clean up all the features.
There is a lot to consider, and I hope that I can chat with Jaques Luckes on the blender today show that Pablo hosts, as you can leave questions that are answered on the show. Hopefully that can give some clarity for the future. But for the mean time, the bevel modifier will maybe just be a bit awkward in size.
To sum up: I think the changes are fine, the modifier might be a bit awkward right now, but it should become easier to work with as a node in the future. Those are my thoughts.