Yitzchak Gale
Joachim, first and foremost, thanks for the awesome libraries ghc-vis and ghc-heap-view.
The design trade-offs for ghc-vis do make sense if you think of it as a didactic tool. But as a debugging tool, the most important factor is that it should "Just Work", with no big builds, no fiddling, no googling. When you reach for a debugging tool, you are *already* in a debugging situation; you don't have patience for also debugging the tool.
I should point out that there is a differential (D3055) by erikd from earlier this year which folded ghc-heap-view into GHC. The goal was to make heap-view a supported library which could be relied upon by third party tools. As far as I can remember most of the hard work is done; it just needed some finishing touches. Perhaps you would be interested in picking it up? Cheers, - Ben