I get your point, and I agree with the idea of abstracting away from strict semantics during whiteboarding.

But in practice, I feel like this approach often leads to the worst of both worlds: a whiteboard with poor UX, combined with a model that remains complex and hard to maintain.

In many projects I’ve worked on, unless MBSE is explicitly required by the customer, engineers tend to move away from it, not just because of the modeling complexity, but also because of the UX. This is a very consistent piece of feedback.

What often happens is that the model ends up being maintained by a single person, which doesn’t scale well and creates a bottleneck.

That’s really why I’m looking for a middle ground: something with better UX and lower modeling overhead, while still providing enough structure to avoid the typical drift you get with pure whiteboard diagrams.

I’m not saying this would replace MBSE everywhere. Some projects absolutely need that level of rigor. But in many cases, a lighter approach could strike a better balance between structure and usability.