Make curve editing as powerful as mesh editing

A very common workflow in Blender for making tube-like shapes is to create a mesh, draw a line using vertices, add vertex bevels or whatever you need, convert to a curve, and add a thickness.

The problem with this is that the tools for curve editing are woefully anemic compared to mesh editing, and you find yourself having to zero out the thickness and convert back to mesh to make any adjustments. When doing this though, you lose all modifiers and material slots, which is a pain.

There are two possible solutions for this:

• Either, add an "edge to curve" modifier, that gives your edges thickness, with optional vertex group to control thickness. This can be easily created using geometry nodes.
• Or, make it so that the curve editor supports control point sliding (G + G), beveling (using de Casteljau?), the knife tool, and CTRL+R with scrolling to subdivide segment.

Or why not do both?