Thanks for that link. I completely share the sentiments of that author. And of course the tools in FC already allow for manipulating curves, but I suppose Erwin is working on making them even more feature-rich.
I would certainly like to see a transition from the off-curve on-curve paradigm to the nodes/handles paradigm prevalent in vector editing tools. Of course, the off-curve points already define the handles, but what I mean is I would like to see the handles and be able to manipulate them, such as in making them collinear (for smooth nodes) and stuff.
[Shifting to a node/handle paradigm would however mean one is no longer able to select an off-curve and on-curve points and align/distribute them horizontally or vertically using the relevant commands. However, I cannot see any meaning in aligning an on-curve point with an off-curve one. Perhaps though there is some meaning to aligning off-curve points mutually so as to maintaining a uniform size of handles. Distributing a mixture of on-curve and off-curve points may have a similar use. Perhaps then a mixture of both approaches would be possible. {Obviously, I’m just thinking out aloud in all this.}]
Surely the way to go is to improve the vector tools, e.g. to have some automatic curve smoothing to remove excess points?
FontLab seems to have a smoothing option. Not sure how efficient it is, though.
Basically the way I look at it is like this:
There should be nodes (on-curve points) wherever the tangents to the curves are paraxial. There should be nodes wherever there are inflection points in the curve (because these are second-order Beziers and cannot contain inflections). Apart from that, there should be nodes only when it is absolutely unavoidable for maintaing the proper desired shape of the curve (as in circular/elliptic components).
This would spell for proper economy in terms of points IMO.
BTW, at least in the case of nodes where the tangents are paraxial, I suppose we can already make sure that the curve is smooth by ensuring that the off-curve - on-curve - off-curve points are aligned up vertically or horizontally? (See also remark above.)