Hi Martin,
I love seeing this alignment video reemerge, I'm looking forward to easier alignment on the canvas. Thanks for pushing for good UI for this.
I recently tried out the newest Paint.NET and found their manipulation UI interesting. When moving a mouse cursor out on the edge/margin of an object the courser icon changes and rotation is possible automatically.
Could something like this be a consideration if you are wanting to keep the number of layers of interaction (three click-cycles) down? Perhaps moving to the margin or waving around the cursor of a selection of objects would force a hovering alignment tool to appear?
Just putting this out there as if you need more ideas. (I haven't seen Fernando's attachment that was scrubbed for me in the mailing list)
--Jared