Thanks for taking the time to read through all this, ErikG! 
Yeah, in the further idea section I mentioned having the signal flow represented by the node system. I’m not using node based VFX systems myself. I can imagine they’re complex if one’s not used to working with them. But when kept simple they work pretty well.
On the Mac I’m using Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba for some things. And they switched to a simple node based interface with their latest version. It’s brilliant and simple I think, check out the video and screenshots.
But let’s say we wouldn’t go that far. In general, my concept is targeted to organise lots of small projects if working on games / FX libs / SFX for movies.
I think it could all work if we could embed a project file as a clip into a project. Nesting projects so to speak. It could look like this. Like folder track data.
Imagine the selected clip was a sub-project inside my current project file. Double click on a sub-project clip and the project opens without re-loading, because it’s not a separate project but it’s embedded. It’s a way to nest projects. Keep it all together while keeping sanity and not juggle hundreds of tracks.