I am a software developer and I would not develop code without an IDE. The point is that behind all that text you type there is a more abstract concept of your thoughts. If a GUI can replicate you thoughts well it is a lot faster than the "text only" approach. To stay with your example, a good gui would allow to right click on a graph that opens up a context menu in which you can change the color. This is much faster than searching for the color definition, changing the color to blue, run the script again, seeing that it's not that blue that you had in mind, changing it again and so on.
It all sounds like you wouldn't need it until you grasp the idea. So don't be so pessimistic, we know what we're doing.
-- „Alle sagten: Das geht nicht. Da kam einer, der wusste das nicht und hat's gemacht.“ - Unbekannt