I'm not on buildbot nine (I think the new waterfall UI is a big regression), but what that is describing looks like a statically defined list of workers that scale up and down dynamically. What I'm looking for is the ability to add and remove workers at will, without having to add them to the configuration list and restart the master.
In terms of underpowered build steps, I have several fairly complicated, 1k-2k line build factories, with multiple codebases and hundreds of steps (some custom, some from the stdlib). There's many dependencies between the steps, and many different properties that can be toggled in the UI. All these steps need to be defined up-front in the master, but their actual execution often depends on runtime information, so it becomes a mess of doStepIfs. I think it would be an improvement to give a program on the worker the power to tell the service what it wants to do, rather than the other way around.
One way to scale up / down workers in Buildbot is to have more workers defined in the configuration than actually needed with generic names (e.g. worker1, worker2, etc) and then start / stop them when required.
Agree with you on the waterfall UI regression. It seems console view is preferred than waterfall in the recent versions. It's slower than waterfall UI though.
In terms of underpowered build steps, I have several fairly complicated, 1k-2k line build factories, with multiple codebases and hundreds of steps (some custom, some from the stdlib). There's many dependencies between the steps, and many different properties that can be toggled in the UI. All these steps need to be defined up-front in the master, but their actual execution often depends on runtime information, so it becomes a mess of doStepIfs. I think it would be an improvement to give a program on the worker the power to tell the service what it wants to do, rather than the other way around.