Hi Astrid!

Good question, thanks for bringing this topic up! Both components perform different (although similar) actions.

Both combine lists of data, so you would need them if you'd like to combine 2,3 or more lists into a singular list.

You use merge when you "don't really care about the individual lists" whitin the master list (or they've already been setup proper into their own branches).

You just want to combine the lists together so you can perform an operation on only that list without having to repeat that operation for the individual lists, so it's for clarity and speed.

The Entwine component you do care about keeping the individual lists separate, and in their own branch. This may be that later on, in your definition you want to select a specific branch to do an operation on.

In the example below, I have some division points from some curves. I separated them into the division points from the closed curves and division points from the open curves. Now you might say, I don't care that some points are from curves that are open or closed, I just want to generate a curve profile on those spots, extrude that profile curve and get my columns. Here the merge component would work best.

But If you do care that some of those points are from a closed curve, because that means the columns will have some sort of restriction for instance. You'd be better of using the entwine component.

I'm thinking about a specific use case I used Entwine. I believe I had to combine various lists of info, like type, length, area, neighbors, material properties into one master list. This case was perfect for the entwine, because you can say, branch 0 > here will go all the length info; branch 1 > here all the area etc etc.

I hope this makes sense,

Best,

Arie