Hi Michael,

MoI is a brilliant sketchpad, and I don't want to take away from the simplicity of constructing objects and immediacy of what is on offer. I think getting away with the bare minimum in a tool is essential to focus on the task at hand and to get it done as quickly as possible.

You probably get this one all the time, and I can understand the huge complexities involved, but one thing that I find frustrating though is how brittle construction is, where in the final object I find I needed to have changed something in the original shape that constructed it to fine tune the results to what I actually wanted, this takes me a lot of time to repeat the steps from scratch every time. Not an easy one to tackle but being able to keep things non-destructive as much as possible would be wonderful if you can work out how to make the impossible happen. I notice that people have requested a non-destructive fillet command command, and a multi-radius fillet, so perhaps this is a good place to investigate workflow around non-destructive editing. SolidWorks has limited features along this line, where you draw shapes and set constraints to some parameters like which edges get a fillet and the fillet radius and can go back and edit those constraints or the original shapes. Even if this breaks things down the line if you could at least get some of the steps along the way to the final result done automatically this would still help.

Sometimes it's fun also to play with more algorithmic generation and see what happens, this can be inspiring in a completely different way, but not if you have to delve into scripting languages to get there since you are suddenly ripped away from shapes and geometry and plunged into the world of symbols. I recently watched a great talk on this kind of non-brittle construction using basic 2D concepts, that can also be driven by data, but I think this sort of thing is really useful for 3D as well, data or not:
Drawing Dynamic Visualisations:
http://vimeo.com/66085662