Hi Will,

I'm glad you're not asking for a manipulator in MoI. :-) I'm not too keen on the idea of fiddling around with one of those gyroscope looking things....and besides, they get in the way of what you're lookin' at!

I wonder if a general objective to maintain precise dimensional accuracy is the reason you don't see the Illustrator type of transform tools in a lot of CAD programs? Rhino4 now has the cage editor and soft move which works as you envision I guess if you do a lot of sculptural modeling work and want to do it in Rhino, they come in handy.

Since MoI is easy enough to use as a 3D drawing board to quickly work up design variations before nailing down precise dimensions, the inclusion of 2d drawing tools makes sense.
Michael is probably already planning something like this (only better), but one of the 2D ArtCAM tools that I really like is called an envelope distortion tool..it's useful for making banners.

Jesse