I use tiled clones extensively in my work, and it just feels too fundamental a tool to be kept over in the edit menu, so I agree with that suggestion.
Glad we agree on this point!
I personally disagree somewhat about the reclassification into three tabs, as the tabs as they exist now correspond precisely to the various fundamental linear transformations
That's just it though, you're talking in math terms now. It just happens that the vast majority of people want to run at the mention of "maths." :P You might as well replace everything with transformation matrices...
If you want to reason in maths terms, in my proposal: - The Tiles tab corresponds to the current "x,y" coordinate approach - The Radial tab corresponds to a "radius, angle" coordinate approach
What prompted me to this suggestion is that recently, I wanted to design a simple gear (but still a bit more complicated than what the LPE offers). I ended up doing the rotation manually because it was faster than opening a tutorial to find out what in the world rows and columns were supposed to do for rotations. I just wanted to duplicate the pattern exactly 6 times in a rotation.
A lot of people would want to do that for simple designs such as flowers, clocks, round patterns etc., and they probably don't want to need a maths degree for something that basic.
Good point about other options missing in the Cloned Tiles interface though. So right now, here's a recap on what me may find missing with the current interface: 1. Location: Move to Objects, add a shortcut, open a docker? 2. On-screen guideline. The default will be as currently, but if you select the object and either a straight line or a line with two segments, I'd like a drop-down to appear allowing you to choose it as the guideline for the transformations, so there's no need to resort to tricks to add spacing to tiling, to choose a centre of rotation, etc. 3. The ability to switch between % and absolute values. 4. Add skew. 5. An Easy, intuitive way to do radial clones. At the very least, add a button in the Rotation tab for "Rotate around centre", and maybe add a "Divide sphere by n" times so that people don't have to calculate the exact angle. Of course, people would want the ability to choose what that centre is, which is where the guideline comes in.
An alternative approach would be to add a Radial Align option in the Align Tab. It'd rotate the clones several times around the centre of rotation.
Anything else? I do believe that this is an area where an improvement in just the interface will provide very big returns to users.