It’s a common pattern here to front a pipeline with a block step to get some input from the user.
Then, it’s also pretty common to trigger pipelines from others, supplying metadata. In those cases, we conditional-away the block step.
However, that means it’s all or nothing - the conditional can only apply to the whole block/input step, not just part of the data it wants to get.
I think it would be really nice to change the semantics, so that input & block steps, where meta-data that they collect has been set already, previously, will treat that as “I have the data I would have asked for, I shall continue”.
So for a block step, that would then make it just two button clicks to continue - if all the meta-data is already set by the time we arrive, the fields will all be filled in with that data so it’s click to open the popup then click to continue.
For an input step, if the meta-data is already set by the time we arrive, make the input step a no-op and simply pass straight through.
In both cases (regardless of this semantics change), the UX could be improved by showing which values were in effect when the step was cleared; at the moment one has to know about the /meta-data URL.