I agree that most platforms have struggled to find a balance between designers and developers. But I think platforms that focus on that gap are missing where most business value is actually created.
I think no-code is successful because marketers, salespeople, and customer success teams can use it just as well as anyone else. Putting this power in the hands of the people actually generating revenue for a business means they can start and run businesses without even talking to or hiring a coder — and start learning about their customers from day 1.
I hope to see more platforms blending everything together like you suggested and I agree they'll win in the longrun (can't wait to see what Webflow do in this space!). With a powerful platform like that, the marketing team can design a prototype, salespeople can sell it to customers, customer success teams can fill in the gaps in functionality with manual actions, while designers and developers are hired to rewrite one piece of the prototype at a time and make it more scalable and powerful.
A company I consult for actually started that way — doing everything with spreadsheets combined an amazing customer success team. Now we have a full tech team and a lot of happy customers!
That's my ultimate goal for an open-source framework I'm building called Remake (remaketheweb.com). Right now, it uses HTML as the underlying technology, but that's just to give it a strong foundation. We also have an online IDE and drag and drop builder in the works. I'm hoping non-technical people will be able to copy a template of an app, modify it, start a business — and developers can come in later and add extra functionality once they've already seen some traction with real users!
I also wrote up a blog post about the no-code/low-code ecosystem where I reviewed all of the latest and greatest tools. I'd love for you to check it out if you have time: blog.remaketheweb.com/no-code-and-low-code-tools-…