I think there is some confusion going on here. I donīt know any engine which doesnīt use some kind of node based scene graph.
We were talking about C4
This engine does not only use a node based scene graph same as many other engines
Every object in C4 is a "node" or a "sub node "
You must write a custom " controller " class to edit a node for movement, animation, collision etc
Irrlicht is something similar
This engine architecture can be efficient, I am not arguing , but I am not surprised, either, if someone claims
The C4 engine does look very good although i don't like it's node editing
approach