I do think that a Smalltalk future might have actually managed to be the best of both worlds, combining images and text into one coherent whole. But it never really came to fruition.
As things are, since I may not have both, I'll choose the power of text over the ease of pictures.
The structure that we currently have is file hierarchies and URLs (just another form of Unix-style path strings), and files containing sequences of text with no more structure than line breaks and indentations -- and after 40 years, we haven't even agreed on how to represent those in ASCII. The whole thing is barely removed from sectors on disk.
Smalltalk's class browser let you drill into a live hierarchy of objects and edit them in place. That's already much more advanced than our static blobs of text in a lifeless path hierarchy. And that was in 1975.
I've been working on some networking protocols, and I started by modeling each node as an object. Seemed to make sense. But there's a lot of overhead. Send, receive methods etc etc, and then you've got to instantiate them and then collect the data from the objects afterwards to see how the network did. I switched my code over to being a bunch of stateless functions that operate on a network graph and stuff got a lot less verbose.
This is not necessarily always the case, but I would hate working in an environment where I was forced to always use a very specific metaphor for my work.
Nope!
The fonts are anti-aliased to hell and scalable; and just look at the breathtaking colors!
Moreover, many GUIs are like this: a smattering of miniature tele-types (called "edit boxes" or "input fields") that you must switch among to prepare input before clicking Submit, which is just a thinly-veiled carriage return (and in fact bound to that key).
Just like a "screen" on an IBM 3270:
"Using a technique known as 'read modified', a single transmission back to the mainframe can contain the changes from any number of formatted fields that have been modified, but without sending any unmodified fields or static data." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270)
That was a 1971 design. We have barely made any progress.
Isn't it absolutely crazy that we have laptops with 6-megapixel screens, and we use those capabilities to simulate a 40-year old video terminal that in turn simulates the behavior of an even older line-based Teletype machine? [1]
Programming today is fundamentally the same it was on a PDP-10 many decades ago, except that the unintuitive CLI interfaces have been propped up by fast web search: "Just google it, no big deal."
[1] http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/