Have you tried the outline view in the IDE (Android Studio and IntelliJ)? This simplifies the widget view and you can edit in any view and see the changes in all other views. Plus with hot reload you can see the results of changes immediately.

As for data binding, once you move beyond simple stateful widgets you can use a number of state management techniques, including BLoCs, Redux, scoped model and streams. Try out streambuilder to build things from streams. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.