(I'm a Zapier employee on the Dev Platform team; my comments are mine alone and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer)

You may find the Zapier's developer platform useful. Instead of using pre-built integrations, you can develop and ship your own Node.js packages for private use. I've got a fleet of them that can do basically anything, but also play nice with the rest of the platform.

I'm not sure exactly what your pain points are here, but there's definitely an "escape hatch" for power users!