> I've been so used to only being able to drag directly on the
> control points from all my other applications!

It's not too uncommon for 2D Bezier illustration programs to support a version of this, like in Adobe Illustrator you can click and drag directly on a curve when control points are visible to move it.

But actually the behavior of this "direct curve drag" in these Bezier apps kind of highlights the segmented nature of the pure Bezier approach - over there when you click and drag on a curve, the ends of the segment stay anchored and only the interior 2 points are adjusted. This tends to cause curly-cues and it really spazzes out if you try to drag a point close to the end of a Bezier segment, a tiny motion there causes kind of a huge reaction in the curve. It's not really a full "roughing out" tool over there since only the one segment is effected by the drag.

The NURBS-based direct curve dragging in MoI gives a lot more smooth editing results at any point along a curve.


I'm not really sure why 2D illustration apps have never upgraded to use NURBS-based technology instead of only Bezier-based. I guess Adobe Illustrator never did it because Illustrator is kind of part of a larger Adobe ecosystem and it has been meant to be on par with other parts such as the Postscript language. So they probably don't want to upgrade just one thing, they would want to upgrade a whole bunch of things, making it easier to decide not to upgrade at all. Then other 2D illustration stuff follows their lead...

- Michael