I believe one of the reasons this happens is limited trigger types for email sequences and even more limited support for customizable content in the email (I know Mailchimp does this). Because of that you are left with primitive trigger types like time than something more granular like trigger based on user app activity.
By bringing the automations closer to the application source code, I believe you can build in "engagement" and "rentention" mechanisms that don't suck.
Eventually, once SaaS subscriptions become more commonplace among the rest of the population, a significant number of people are going to be annoyed by the disconnect between the automated emails they receive and the features they’ve already tried out as a new user.
One or two people will see an opportunity and take VC money to fix the disconnect: a way to make email automations smarter by deepening the integration between ESPs and SaaS code bases, as you have done with this oss project.
That’s what we do at Paiger and it’s a fantastic way to ensure people reach the “Aha” moment.
Do they still do that godawful beep while you're trying to read?
Our market is marketers though, not technical people - if it were, I suspect the results would differ.
Sadly their Mixpanel "integration" is very basic and does not sync up the most important engagement data which Mixpanel tracks for discreet features. So the only way to set that up is with by writing your own custom api syncing().
For example, I'm currently trying out PagerDuty, and those pesky emails about "how to configure whatever you've already configured" are really annoying. At least, please take a few minutes to code something to check if your "beloved new customer" already have done what you are suggesting them to do.
My time is quite precious. Please don't waste it by suggesting things you can figure out I already know.