What I miss in Affinity Designer is a way to do complex movements with the nodes. With a shape you can change the center of rotation. Not with nodes. You can also not scale nodes, rotate nodes inside a shape. Where is symmetry for nodes (and a way to change the symmetry plane).
There should be a huge range of manipulators for nodes. Like a magnet tool/soft move tool, smear tool, a tool to change the shape of the nodes into a circle or a rectagle, or a predefined shape (to to do blending), shear tool (is possible now, but hidden in the transforms (and only numerically), bend, flex, twist, bulge, swirl, slice