Tonyinga

Steady on.  Not a great way to motivate us.
 
Priorities doesn't necessary just mean what we think is important, but also what things have to be done in a certain order, and whether those things collectively also are more important than other features which need attention. It is also a balance of how much work is actually involved in what might appear to be a small feature.
 
I have just spent months refactoring a lot of our internal tools in order to facilitate faster future development and enabling editing features across tools.  This was a big task, but the few changes and additions I have made off the back of this have already demonstrated that this was time well spent.  Now, as a user you will have no idea of the scale of the work involved in changing our internal framework while preserving the current functionality of our tools.
 
Software development is a fluid beast.  Only as our code base expanded did it become clear that things could be achieved in a different/better way.  Due to a lot of commitments already made, the changes I wanted to make got pushed back a number of times. I have now made them, and 1.7 will come with some significant additions - though the scale of work to implement them might still not be obvious to the end user.
 
This thread is to show a raft of new (hopefully innovative) features that are in the pipeline, and you are accusing us of pretty much doing nothing to improve the software...!? All of these additions will achieve 99% of the use cases that have been thrown up (while not tying you to a very limiting grid based drawing method) - the only exception being the ONE use case where you want to be able to easily replicate sets of curves built previously using known grid positions for handles. (If I am missing the other use cases, you will have to explain them individually). AND, I have already made many comments as to why this feature will conflict with our current tool usage, but I think I have even said that we will try and add it.  So what is the problem?  You are not going to be getting 1.7 Beta just yet anyway, so why is this turning into a rant?  We have heard your request, and while I would personally argue that placing curve handles on grid produces a very limited artistic scope, I will accept it is the way you like to work.

Yes, but merely constraining angles to a desired set of axonometric axes can be accomplished in any program that provides a user-defined constraint angles feature (ex: the Constrain Guides sub-feature of Illustrator Smart Guides, and similar features in CorelDraw and ACD Canvas) without need for a page-spanning grid.
What's always missing in those features, though, is any provision for assigning correctly-proportional ruler scales along the constrain angles. That's why I said in my previous post "If grids are to serve as the rulers...":

I'm glad you're looking into that, because there has to be some provision for specifying properly foreshortened and accurate measures parallel to the three axis directions from any snapable point in the drawing.
One possible treatment might be a radio button set in the Transform palette labeled "Axis Scale" versus "Page Scale." That would at least provide a substitute for what other mainstream drawing programs are missing in their user-defined constrain angles. Moreover, it would enable entering measures in terms of true-measure values.
But even that does not emulate the direct intuitiveness or elegance of even a pre-computer drafting machine. Axonometric drawing, by definition, is all about making correctly-proportioned direct measures along three coordinate system axes (i.e.; each axis must have its own scale factor, and those scale factors must be correctly proportioned to each other), and zeroing those measures from elements of the drawing, not from increments of a grid. And performing such measurements should not require looking away from the drawing to a palette.
That's why I said that if grids are the only provision to serve as those on-page rulers, then the intersection of the grids needs to be able to be instantly and fluidly zeroed to any point wherever a mousedown occurs, just as the scale head of a physical track drafter effectively "moves" to the point of interest in the drawing and allows the illustrator to perform a measure from there without having to look away from the drawing.
The closest emulation I've yet seen of the kind of fluidity I envision is Lazy Nezumi Pro (so close, yet so far). In its isometric rulers preset, three rulers appear at and follow the cursor. Unfortunately, when set to other axonometric angles, those three rulers do not currently display proportional scales; all three still show the same scale. (I anticipate this changing, since LNP's converging perspective rulers do display proportional scales.) Plus, being an application-independent "overlay" seems to limit its functionality for vector drawing because (among other things) it is unaware of the program's zoom. And though tick marks were just recently added to the elliptical rulers (thereby allowing them to serve as elliptical protractors--something essential to serious axonometric drawing), the increments are not yet snapable.
But the interface concept is quite sound and elegant (and not unlike similar cursor-following interfaces of high-end 3D modeling applications). A similar treatment actually built into a 2D drawing program would not have those limitations.
For example, imaging drawing with the Pen Tool in its Straight Line mode:
The Axes feature is turned on. Three light-colored axonometric ruler guides appear, with their origin under the cursor. There are correctly-proportional tick marks along each of the three rulers. This set of guides always follows the cursor during mouseup, while the cursor responds to all the normal snapping candidates.
Upon mousedown, the rulers stay put.  The user drags along one of the axis guides. If he holds a modifier key, the cursor snaps to the tick marks of that axis. If he releases the modifier key, the angle constraint is still active, but the tick mark snapping is not. Either way, though, a distance readout (accurate to 4 decimals, please) continually appears next to the cursor.
That allows the illustrator to draw quickly with reasonable precision without having to look away from his drawing and toward a transform palette. But the transform palette (assuming its Axis Scale checkbox is on) can still be used to manually enter exact length.
Given such an interface, a page-spanning grid would not even be necessary. Sure, it would be useful when one wants to automatically "project" side views drawn "in the flat" onto the axonometric planes, and that's fine. But most of my drawing would be done with the grid display turned off. The whole purpose of axonometric methods is to allow the illustrator to intuitively draw directly into a mechanically-correct 3D orthographic perspective without having to draft side views first.
Oh, I'm all for some fresh innovation rather than just conventional wisdom. I look forward to seeing what you have in mind for the new feature. I just hope it's not too "locked in" to be open to some user feedback in terms of the implementation.
JET
 

@JET_Affinity
 
Something to understand about our Grids and Axis feature - they are complementary but work independently.  You define the axis direction for your grid, but you are not limited to using the grid for snapping.  All bounds snapping and constraining will follow the axis you defined.  So, for isometric, when holding Shift to constrain - you'll get containing to the axis of your isometric grid.  You are not required to place things on grid lines, but you can follow the grid direction.
 
Having the grid visible, but having "Snap to grid" turned off will give you the visual cues of the grid lines, but not limit you to placing objects on grid lines.
 
Alignment when snapping will follow the grid axis - again, you don't have to have snap to grid turned on, but you can align according to the directions of the grid.
 
The Pen and Node tool, for example, will also allow you to project alignments between curve handles along grid directions, and find intersections between projections between two handles.
 
As far as proportional scaling goes - that is how the create in plane and planar rotate features work - they are aware of the planar scaling and apply the correction. I had considered a mode for presenting sizes in planar units (for example, in the transform tab and the measurement tool) - that is something I'll look into.
 
As for the grid origin - yes, you will be able to arbitrarily place that anywhere you want, and use snapping to snap to objects in your illustration.  For planar grids with non-uniform axis, this will allow you to define the relative plane position into which you might snap to grid.
 
If there is anything I'm missing, you'll have to try the tools and see how they play.
 
I've not tried to copy any existing applications when making these tools.  I've just tried to think about how I'd want to draw isometric and find ways to make snapping, alignment and object creation work.  Hopefully that results in us being innovative rather than getting stuck in another applications approach.
 

Regarding the axonometric grids and ruler origin reset:
Hopefully before these two related sneak peek features reach a customer beta stage (in which feature schema and behavior is mostly already committed and focus is mostly just on bug testing), I want to throw this out, so I can sleep at night:
Having been doing isometric drawing since the days of drawing "on the board" before desktop computers, I dare say you won't find anyone more enthusiastic about adding some geometric intelligence (other than just snapping) to the plane grids (more akin to DrawPlus). Such grids are a great way to introduce commercial illustrators without prior experience to axonometric drawing.
So don't think it contradictory when I say this: In all those decades, frankly, I have never met a fellow serious axonometric illustrator who is highly dependent upon grids; neither before the advent of graphics software nor since. Here's why:
There is a fundamental concept which the trivial "isometric grid" features in mainstream drawing software typically gets completely "backward":
As usually implemented, grids make your drawing conform to the grids, when the grids should be adapting to the drawing.
Grids tend to force your drawing to conform to the increments of the fixed grid. That's fine for "fantasy" drawing like, for example, bird's eye view game artwork wherein the actual dimensions and spacing of whatever "boxy" shaped things you are drawing are entirely up to you. But in real-world technical drawing, it's not about just drawing conveniently "boxy" things, and it's not about making your drawing measures conform to a fixed grid; it's about having a set of freely moveable and correctly proportioned angled rulers which enable you to make correctly-scaled measures from any point in your drawing.
In pre-computer days, the only time you saw a tech illustrator using a grid was when he was away from his drawing board (or when his drawing board was not equipped with a track drafter). Newbie illustrators would sometimes use a printed axonometric grid under a sheet of tracing paper. And guess what: He would be constantly moving the grid around under his drawing sheet.
A technical illustrator is not the least bit concerned with measures incremented from any page origin. He's constantly gliding his properly-angled rulers to make measures from pre-existing points in his drawing.
If grids are to serve as the rulers for axonometric drawing, they need to be able to act like rulers and freely follow the cursor, not be stuck to any page origin. The origin of the grids (the intersection point of the three planes) needs to be able to snap to any snapping candidates in the artwork, completely free from interference from a page layout grid.
This is essentially why no grid-based approach has ever really matched the quick, easy, intuitive fluidity of a physical drawing table equipped with a mechanical track drafter. The closest software emulations of the fluidity of the physical tools metaphor are not grids, but three proportional rulers (axes) which follow the cursor, as in some 3D modelers.
But axonometric drawing is, by definition, a 2D construction method historically performed on a 2D sheet of paper. So there's no reason a similar interface could not be provided in a general-purpose 2D illustration software, based on 2D geometry.
JET