Quite often I see people inspecting data using the Text Panel, and then (horror) using the output of the panel to continue the data. Clearly this is what people expect to be able to do, and the fact that’s it’s a really bad idea in GH1 is therefore a kind of bug. I had the idea of creating a proper Data Viewer object which wouldn’t just display a summary textual description of the data flowing through it, but actually displays the data in useful detail. For text that would involve displaying whitespace characters, for numbers perhaps both rounded and roundtrip formats, for geometric types a 3D preview.
It sounds like this is something quite close to what you’re after, but maybe not exactly the same.
Quick mockup:
