Grasshopper (especially if you use plugins) may have too many similar components, I understand your concerns about the obscurity of some outputs. I rather prefer enhancements to some basic components if they are logical. Althought I think compatibility is important, maybe I don’t value it as much because I don’t have to share GH definitions with others that often.
In my opinion, every component that has some outputs hidden should have some kind of symbol visible all the time, that would communicate it, not only when zoomed in. Maybe something subtle would fit, similar to the symbol of multithreaded components. Also, the default visibility of given component outputs could be configurable in user settings, but this might be an overkill.
There once was a discussion about the performance of some components and if I’m not mistaken this might be an implementation of it. The volume component should work much faster if we hide the centroid output.