Hi madsen, I think something that will like you of v3 are the new deformers, you can look for "flow" and "twist" in the forum, and I think there will be added more of them in the future but I'm not sure.

"BTW - any way to manipulate the "workplane" to follow view? - follow my view perpendicular? maybe in v3?"

Nothing like modo right now but you can relocate the construction plane with the cplane command under the view tab in the middle panel of the sidebar.


"and can i load reference 2d sketches in V3"

You can do it right now with the image command same place as cplane.


"AND - just reading about moi catchup edition 8 page 19 - and there is this picture with a surface with tons of control points - is that because it is a lofted surface via splines/curves - or can somehow apply / distribute control points to a plane?"

The more points have a curve, and the more curves are used for construct a surface, the more points the surface will have.