Gee, thanks for the sermon. My quest was not to make you happy. I love it when people on forums start out, "I'm just guessing, but..." and then provide no real help, and assume I have not tried the obvious before posting.
I'm an IT professional with experience with many tools. In my opinion Pages should be the right tool to use on a Mac for laying out text and graphical objects on a page, with the flexibility to allow me to maintain them. I had hoped it would work well because then I could progress to automatically populating a page with objects representing automatically-discovered cloud components, using AppleScript or Swift (I'm fluent in both) or maybe Go (learning), depending on the available APIs. Too bad it failed.
For the moment I'm looking at Google Drawings (which has the object nesting I need but no API) or Google Slides (which has an API but not apparently for Mac native languages). I am migrating this drawing series from Visio which does do what I need, has a great addressable object model and an OK programming language, but has never been released for Mac and is one of my last reasons for using Windows under Parallels.
If you know of an Apple product or low-cost Mac native product that can do complex nested graphic pages, and ideally has an API or an addressable object model, I'm open to suggestions.
