Hi again, and of thank you so much for the extensive reply and taking the time to provide examples. Again - great customer support :)

Regarding tweak mode : yeah, in pretty much every regular 3D program it is universally enabled by switching the reference system and/or the manipulator system to "screen" (reference system options like world, screen, local and parent are usually visually indicated in a drop down list in the UI). In my case, I simply have a shortcut script toggling that in, in addition of hiding the manipulator for visual clarity (no need to have the X and Y direction indicated when in screen mode). I personally use alt-t for it (t as in "tweak") but of course it varies among users. I think the term "tweak" was first introduced back in the Mirai days but I might be mistaken.

It's very interesting to hear about the user psychology side of things, that's for sure - for instance, I come from an architecture background (but was drawing a lot on paper at the same time), then moved to character modeling and now totally focus on character design and prototyping, and I find such quick, easy and intuitive manipulation systems to be totally necessary - but it is very true that I did not care for that kind of stuff back in the Autocad days when all I needed was to draft elevations and accurate projections. (I actually gradually left that aside because I felt that CAD introduced high precision drafting too early in the design process, at the cost of creative iteration, and ended up doing most of my uni projects on paper, but that's another story :D )

I think that the reason why I tend to think that MOI could benefit from the kind of feature discussed earlier (not just for point manipulation, but also for transformation at the object model) is because I am getting the feeling that the app is already much more intuitive and, in a way, "free-form" to use than anything out there - it feels smoother than Rhino, more fun than Max, and so on. Also I notice that there is an improved object manipulation system in the app now (allowing to rotate objects intuitively thanks to nice on-screen manipulators, bypassing the need to place reference points and axises in "CAD-style" fashion) so I feel that there is somehow a push in the direction of free-form manipulation. BUT! I also understand that keeping a straight roadmap and vision for app development is crucial and screen-space manipulation might simply not fit in that scheme, which is totally fair and I fully understand that.

Regarding polygon modelers : unfortunately, they are not as smooth as they seem to be :/ Of course there are alot of great things possible with them, but a general trend in the game industry now is to roughly block out things out of "virtual clay" in Mud or Zbrush, then export that to Max/Maya or specialized retopolgy programs to trace control edges on top, and then only at the end, produce the regular subdivision mesh with regular polygon modeling. This is a very solid workflow for actual asset production, but not so efficient when it comes to the rapid prototyping side of things where all that matters is fast iteration with the art director.

I personally might just end up with an hybrid workflow combining the above - I still have to experiment further. (I gave the MOI obj imoporter/converter script a try a while ago but IIRC it was importing every edge as a spline as opposed to displaying a shaded/ghosted object, which was too busy visually for dense meshes)

On a slightly off topic note (but still on the subject of rapid creation) : is there any plan for a greasepencil/sketch tool in MOI ? For instance, it would be great to be able to sketch a freehand product design straight within the MOI interface in the ortho views, and then work on top of such a ghosted sketch to draft the actual source curves for the clean NURBS model.

Thanks again for the great suggestions and discussion !