I’m unsure if “constant radius” is the best way to describe this, but when a tube path has sharp corners, the tube looks squashed (non-uniformly scaled) as it approaches those corners. Is there a way to either ensure a constant tube radius throughout its entire length OR automatically generate a fillet or bevel at sharp corners so that the squashing effect is minimised? One or both of these options I think would be great additions.
AFAIK, there is nothing to smooth the path. It’s a broad and complex problem. There are multiple ways to smooth it, each one with specific use case.
For example, you can smooth whole path with a Bezier…or just the corner. And for the corner, smoothing (might) depends on the radius of the tube. Bigger the radius, the more distance you have to smooth.
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Yes, makes sense. For my use case I’m really just wanting to retain mostly straight line segments, but avoid or minimise that ugly non-uniform scaling of the cross-section at sharp corners, so ideally just a simple fixed, small radius, 3 segment bevel at each corner would achieve that. Maybe I need to look into how Blender does vertex bevels.
For the time being I’m cheating and creating multiple tubes from a path (one tube for each path segment) then filling the corner gaps with spheres of the same radius, but it’s a bit naff 
One of these might give you some ideas
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Thanks @JohnK . That frame code might do the trick.