That's not a simple question, but I'll give it a try.
You write: "The problem is that there's always a disconnect between my flowchart and the way my design looks and functions when I try to explain it to others".
Overcoming this type of problems was one of our main goals creating Tersus, and when we released Tersus as open source 3 years ago, we aimed to overcome the "inconsistencies between what the application is supposed to do, what you think it is doing and what it actually does.” (see http://www.tersus.com/#Id=196).
In a sense, we have gone further than what you ask for. In Tersus, you don't need "faked up" components that will later be implemented in code. You can visually model the full application (GUI and logic), with all the details, and your diagram gets executed by the Tersus runtime engine.
That's the good part, and if you devote some time to learning Tersus, you'll get a feeling of its power and flexibility.
The bad part is that we don't use flowchart shapes at all. In Tersus, all display and process elements appear on screen as rectangles, and they only differ in their icons.
You can overcome this partially by creating a set of models with icons of flowchart shapes, so each model has the "right" icon, but this will not solve the semantic gap that might exists between your desired flowchart language and the Tersus visual language. I don't know if there is any "standard flowchart language", but if there is, we certainly don't use it. You'll have to use the templates we provide and construct the missing ones from the existing building blocks.
I don't know what all this means for you. If you could provide a small example of a flowchart you would expect to be able to draw and then execute, we would try to see how far we are from being able to do it.
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