IIRC under babel-watch it required me to include babel-polyfill at the top of my main script, but under babel-node it prevented me from including babel-polyfill at the top of my main script. (babel-polyfill has a check so that it can only be required once, and errors out otherwise.) That meant I needed to keep commenting/uncommenting that line when I wanted to debug things.

There were also cases where I wasn't sure if babel-watch was reloading dependencies properly if I used async code in a file, which is why I had to keep switching to babel-node or running the code through babel and inspecting the generated code to debug. Overall, it just felt very new and unpolished (which I guess it was...I was working with it around March, so babel-watch was < 1 month old and babel async/await was about 2-3 months at the time) to be relying on all the time.