I often get presented with an API where you have to manually configure a lot of components to get an output.
AVAudioEngine is one of these, connecting sound sources, to mixers, to effects to outputs in code worked, but it wasn't fun
Phonique was built so that I could quickly experiment with creating audio graphs
One supercool feature I made was that you could add buttons to the graph, whilst not that impressive, I had a feature that would export a complete Xcode Project, generate the UI and graph, so that you could test your App straight away