I would think that the range of the work perfromed would dictate what tools to use.
to meausre soil moistire, or if a car is parked in a stall or the height of a water tank, then display that result and maybe turn on a thing. not hard to visualize that.
I would suspect that until one gets extremely advanced, the vast majority of things controlled have less than a dozen types of sensors. (100 cars in a lot would be 1 type of sensor)
brewing beer or running a CNC machine or tracking the sun takes a lot of horsepower, but for really only a few sensors or a few outputs.
if you can put your flow chart, en total, on one page, it would seem that the analysts can be very simple.