Yes, you are right. Sorry for hijacking. But if you still missed the point I will summarize it for you and I will give you a little outlook in the end:

I really believe that everything you wrote works fine for you. And I am sure that people like you, who love to play around with shaders from scratch will agree with you. I would do as well if that would be my focus.

But I saw you trying to convince new users like Sama all the time to write their own shaders. And that is fine. But often it will not happen. There are several reasons for it. Most users need to write shaders only once per project and it is not the top priority. They will not learn every hint and trick. A workshop does not teach them the background of 3d lighting theory, matrix manipulation, variable types and much more. Even when they successfully wrote their own shader, probably the workshop shader with only a little adjustments, then they will continue on their project and forget about that very fast. And next time they have to start from scratch again. So I doubt that they write shaders in minutes, even when that works for you.

Another reason is that there are 2 kind of beginners: Some want to make a small realistic project. They dont want to write excessive graphics features. They never care about these shaders. The other ones are dreamers and want to have a modern up-to-date project. And they dream of great shadows, post-processing, HDR, DOF SSAO and even global illumination. The workshop will not teach them how to write that and they will not accomplish something like that in minutes. But they might see that some technology offers this right at the beginning.

So what is it all about? Basically: Most users will not write the graphical effects they dream of as fast as you said. And they dont want to write another normal mapping shader. They expect something old like that as the basics already included. They dream of something more advanced and will probably not accomplish it.

If you are honest, you will see that exactly this happens around us. The more advanced shader developers like Hummel, BohHavoc, HeelX and Slin also did not make such great shaders only from a workshop. They learned alot from Nvidia or from PDF research documents. They learned much more than only HLSL. The programming language is always the smallest issue, the knowledge behind the algorithms, the theory and the optimization strategies are the real asset, that has to be learned over time. And you often picture it, as if they can get all this in a few hours.
But the point I wanted to make is that many users dont want to start a journey over months or years without progressing on the real game.

Another fact you brought up is, that it would be easy to write a node-based editor for Gamestudio. I dont know how long you have been a Gamestudio user, but I remember that there was an official project like that. There was a module-based shader editor. I was even able to test the beta version. It never saw the release day. Maybe it is not that easy.

But on the other hand, this would be a great product. I know from the sales figures (e.g. from the Unity Asset Store) that tools like this sell much better than model packs. I know people who just wrote a framework for an iOS engine and they quit their day job and live only from that. But this also depends on the amount of engine users. I have no figures how many active users develop with GS.