First off, a disclaimer: I don’t really make full use of Tinderbox, though I’ve a(n annually renewed) licence for almost as long as I’ve had DEVONthink.
Secondly, to answer your question I’m going to show a lot of things that look complex, but most of them are fairly basic built-in features, or rely on simple code – much less than you’d need to learn AppleScript / JavaScript to get working code. The problem with TBX is that a lot of it looks more daunting than it actually is to get some fairly impressive results from it.
Anyway, to your question: while it shares some of the same features as DT3, you really don’t use TBX for the same things. For example, both TBX and DT3 are capable of note taking, and of storing data, but you wouldn’t want to keep PDFs in the former, or do data analysis or visualisation in the latter.
At heart, TBX is a very powerful outliner based on individual notes. Each note can have any number of attributes (metadata) which you can view either as the basic outline, or in a number of graphical ways (on a map, as a table, as a dashboard, as a network of links, and more). You can query any of those attributes either ad hoc or as permanent dynamic searches, you can pull in (‘watch’) information from DT3, in Notes, in the Finder, on websites, and much more. It’s essentially a toolkit for outlining and visualising your data…
That’s difficult to see, I know. So let’s take an example of something many of us do in DT3: keep a daily journal in which we record a log of what’s happened, subsections on various items, reviews of books we’ve read, tasks, and perhaps log our weight. It’s easy enough in DT3: it’s essentially a Markdown file, to which you may add a metadata field for weight, and tags for #book_review, say. You can do lots of things with those daily Markdown files – display them as html, show the metadata in the inspector and column, search for the tags, and so on.
TBX can do all that as well, but what it adds are many more tools to accumulate and display the data in the daily notes. Here is a screenshot of my journal from 2022: it’s from the dashboard giving up to date stats – well, it’s a dashboard, but it goes far beyond anything that I suggested for DT3 right at the beginning of this thread… (Ignore the 'only -618 days to go – that’s because it’s from 2022!)
I should stress that all this is generated from the equivalent of writing one daily note every day. I would create a new note for the day, enter the day’s weight as an attribute (metadata field), then for each event during the day create a sub note and tag it. The dashboard collates all the weight data and displays it as a graph, calculates the max and min, displays the tasks and the updated count of tags etc.
There is code involved, of course, but much of is of the same order of simplicity you’d use in equivalent AppleScript or Excel tables. E.g. $Average=avg(children, $WordsTotal) averages the daily word count of notes for the child notes in a month. OK, you’ve got to learn the syntax, but there’s nothing there to frighten anyone who’s come across an Excel formula, I think.
But this is only one view (a Map view) on the notes. I can also view them in an Outline:
These are the same notes, just a different view of them – it’s a keystroke away. I can also see them as a table:
depending on how I want to work on them – each view has its own strengths, of course, and you rarely use all the views in every TBX file.
Say you have a TBX file with a lot of links between notes. You can see them in a map view like so:
Or in Hyperbolic view, which changes the size / shape of linked notes depending on how many links there are between them and the target note. (a little like DT3 does with ‘Related Words’ in the Cloud Inspector, for links). Hyperbolic view is quite hard to explain: this link may explain it better…
Much of what I’ve shown above is obtained through basic features without much (and often without any code), just basic notes and the selection of attributes. Some of the action code to do the calculations can be a little more complicated (and can get vastly above my pay grade…) but you can do an awful lot with some very basic ideas.
For example, the equivalent code for a DT3 Smart Search to find every Book Review note with the tag ‘productivity’ can, once you’ve created the necessary attributes, be as simple as entering:
$NoteType == "Book Review" & $Tags.contain("productivity")
into the relevant box. OK, it’s coding, but it’s not much more difficult that DT3 when you get the hang of it – certainly easier than learning AppleScript or JavaScript, IMO.
BTW, I forgot to mention that the journal TBX file can be exported to html as a full website (not just as individual pages as in DT3, but as a self-contained web-ready blog).
The real difficulty with Tinderbox, is that even more than Scrivener and DT3, it can do so much that the question is often ‘what do you want to do with it?’. It’s not for everyone, of course, but it does do things that other programs don’t do at all, and you often don’t have to do all that much coding to get there.
Sorry for rabbiting on a bit, but you did ask 
