I think that doing this logic left to right is more intuitive as well (I even mentioned that before in this thread). However, there were some issues with this approach. It took me a while to change my mind to use the current approach, but now I think it works quite well. It’s actually the same solution that is used in Softimage ICE.
You really have to give me some more details on what you actually want to do/how it should look like in your opinion. I don’t fully understand what you mean based on this description.
That is correct.
I understand what you mean. I’m not a big fan of your first proposed solution either, because it might conflict with other use cases. The same is true for your second proposed solution. Otherwise it might get confusing what an emitter actually is. E.g. are the Trail and Explode nodes considered emitters? They are multiple things at the same time.
I want to address this use case separately. Actually, I implemented a solution for this on Sunday and Monday: Particle Groups. The nice thing about this solution is that it is more generic and therefore more flexible.
This does not solve the issue that new users could have a wrong understanding of how the Combine Influences node works, but I guess this is something that just has to be learned… Maybe a different name or layout could help as well.
In this screenshot you can also see that I removed the Falloff inputs again, as mentioned some days ago. This makes it easier to give the user more control while not introducing a new concept (falloffs), that has to be learned. They will be replaced by more “particle function inputs”, like the Particle Info or Is In Group node.