Hi Brian, it's definitely an area I want to explore in the future.

But actually yes there is some difficulty involved.

One problem is that universal manipulator style stuff is really designed to work for sculpting type manipulations of points while working in the 3D view.

If you imagine that 3D manipulator being applied to only curves inside of a 2D view, like the top view, then it seems really pretty weird. There are no 2D illustration applications that use a manipulator like that, with a cluster of controls appearing right smack in the middle of the 2D shapes being manipulated.

So the 3D manipulator like you show is somewhat of a mis-match for MoI, since 2D curve drawing is a big focus in MoI, actually more than 3D point sculpting.

To begin with, I'll probably be focusing on providing more of a 2D style editing frame, that would show up around the outside of the selected planar objects. This would provide a way for quickly rotating and scaling 2D shapes. I haven't quite figured out what to do for 3D shapes yet, but I'll probably try for some kind of outside frame there too...

You can get a preview of what I think this frame will look like by inserting a background image using View / Image in the current version. While you are inside of that command the images are editable and they have this type of frame around them, with scaling working by dragging the frame corner points, and rotation working by dragging on the rotation handle. You can also click on the rotation handle (instead of drag on it) to pull up a 3-axis rotation widget.

There are still many details to work out for how this would apply to objects though, but that should give you an idea of the direction that I'm thinking of right now.

- Michael