The weakness of the default Automatic Layout for orthogonal connectors, seems, on inspection, to consist in an artificial gravitational compression of sibling ranges, which skews parents towards each other, and away from the centre of their respective child ranges.

( Rather like a dysfunctional family in which siblings never quite grow up, and, for lack of centred parental attention, continue to cling to each other, never becoming fully centered on their own children :-(

The result is this:


A more natural (and much more clear and legible) default would simply be:



Is this beyond the capacity of the underlying Graphviz engine ?

Could the strange and dysfunctional mutual attraction of siblings not be switched off, or at least made optional for orthogonally connected trees ?

(In the Automatic Layout version, it is not even clear whose children are whose ...)