Well sorry for making monstrous statements, but the question was about need rather than want 
I think you all got the point I agree about big word but anyway.
More damn nodes. Start a thread when you can create any kind of glass in any scene with about 6 to 12 mouse clicks in color and value boxes. Forty five seconds fifty tops.
it would be nice for advanced utilisation of them, but the modifier stack is still pretty fast and usefull…
another point is that you need the nodes vindows open all the time, because modifiers are something we use a lot.
It could be opened when you need it, same with material nodes - it doesn’t need to be opened all the time, when you can you would just use the material stack simple
Do we need nodes? no. When you have a text editor you just have to type in the pixel/normal coordinates of every vertex and the face indices, saving the result with the extension .OBJ. Anything else is bloatware.
What is more important than nodes (even though nodes would be amazing), would be modifiers to work in hierarchies. That way if you have a car, for example, done in many objects, if you wanted to lattice deform it you wouldn’t need to go linking all modifiers (not to mention the problems that come when animating them). Modifiers can’t even be linked properly, so you have to go “copying to selected” and then putting keys in all of them. Insanely bad, modifiers work only for modelling, not for any other scene workflow or animation.