Yeah thats not what you typed. Yeah most new systems work like that. the way maya was designed was to satisfy autocad users 
OK modo has a advanatage here, it does not need to diferentiate between historyh and nonistory actions. Nevertheless you request can be accomodated. What happens in modo is that a teomporary trasformation node is made and yoru actually manipulating it (thats basically the same thing as a maya cluster). Maya can do the same thing, is just that deleting it once manipulation is finished is a bit more painfull so i wont demo it for you. Writing one demo.
Thing is mayas been dead in the water for 4 years when it comes to usability if you want imporvement you need to do it yourself. Maya WILL DIE at some point its just that things like modo need to be significantly better than maya at 90% of everything before a mass exodus. Modo is perhaps the strongest contender but its nowhere near that point yet. Mayas still the best PLATFORM ive seen, even if the restof the experience sucks. It works for me but it doenst work for artisty types much longer, no amount of cool gresy is going to fix this. Same applies to max and softimage. Houdini and lightwawe are the oddballs here.
As for my second question I think I can use your first answer pretty well
Lol yeah ok i can accomodate this its jut a bit more work, i just try to avoid stupid user questions. The way i used it for years was way to 0 scale is to scmh -r vectorOfAxis toa hotkey.
Anyway i must digress maya scale manipulator IS bad its relative wich kindof sucks, which is why i dont use mayas default scale manipulator (i made my own.) Its not a big deal to fix, i could ship it for you but im not all that interested in doing awfully lot of pro bono work anymore. Theres allmost NO CHANCE that autodesk will ever do this for you. But if it really makes your life so much easier then im sure someobe will do it for you for 20-30$ if you can pool with 5 people willing to pay. Its not more than a few hurs of work*
- thing is its very easy to do theese kinds of changes as long as you dont try to commercialize them. You get into the area of diminishing returns. So i can make it in 10-60 minutes, but polishing it for sale takes 2 mounths. And thats why i dont release any tools. They woudl simply suck even tough they do all one would want.
