I had a related question at one point - Is there a better way to scale to absolute units?
As a relative newcomer to Rhinoceros, this topic, (and the responses it tends to elicit) has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me as well. The fact that we can see the object properties in Info and not adjust them has always felt odd, it’s not that dissimilar from Adobe Illustrator’s Properties dialog, where basic bounding-box X/Y parameters and other data types can be directly edited, (both for individual elements/paths and groups). Granted - these are sort of crude “orientation” transformations, that only pertain to a rectilinear bounding box in Cartesian world coordinates - but for many design and houskeeping operations this is a fairly natural approach.
So thanks @ore - BoxEdit is really good to know about, it looks like it sort of does the above.
Is there a backstory on why there isn’t more direct editing in Rhino? As @lander points out - the sprawling complexity (bureaucracy?) of a history tree isn’t really one-and-the-same with parametric/direct editing. I think it’s also clearly a fundamental virtue of Rhino that we have granular/atomic access to much of the elemental nature of NURBS - and that should never be sullied by or confused with more macro level operators, (would these approaches inevitably be in conflict?).
I see there are a couple of tickets for these kinds of tools, so maybe they will arrive at some point -
RH-145