The icon and animation approach also makes adding new functionality to Triggers difficult because new visualizations have to be created. Not every feature will have a natural visualization. The approach of displaying every marker and pixel pattern on the Desktop Blanket was also breaking down as programs would have a dozen or more patterns. When the Desktop Blanket is not displaying meaningful context, the result is a bunch of patterns scattered about. Since the issue of how to handle program structure is independent of pixel data access and I do not have any magic solutions for making abstract structure more direct, it makes sense to adopt a tried and true textual program representation.
Text is easy to lay out in a way that uses space efficiently.
There are standard ways of nesting structure that show many levels of detail at one time. Classic control structures are easy to introduce for the many programs that do not fit naturally to the trigger control structure. Yet, the trigger control structure can remain with a consistent textual representation. It is easy to extend using symbolic names. I expect experience with a prototype like Triggers-IV will lead to more issues that are unique to pixel data access.