I think, We should have a realtime view of the data(top 5 rows) below the workflow, may be a new tab in the outline window/tab. I believe alteryx has a data view below the workflow, guess this adds a lot of ease.
Maybe the Node Monitor is what you’re looking for? It’s a bit of a hidden feature. Check out this blog post (scroll down to the How to Monitor the State of a Node section) for more info on how to enable it.