Surveying, Mapping and GIS

I am loving some of the new additions to ArcGIS Desktop 9.2, and as a longtime user of packages like AutoCAD, I was frankly wondering why some of these enhancements didn't come along much sooner. With this, I tend to draw parallels - for example, the measuring pallette, though with welcome enhancements, still fell slightly short for me - the "measure area" tool doesn't provide much feedback with regard to which polygon was just measured. If there are multiple overlapping layers, there is no highlight to show the selected polygon, and no output to the results panel where the resultant area is displayed. Either of those would be a great touch for the ArcGIS Desktop team to add. Being able to selectively render the output as acres, hectares, and other units - very cool.

Linear / Polygon measuring - being able to snap to features is great - but again, what are we snapping to? In AutoCAD, the user can define his OSNAPs - for example endpoint, midpoint, intersection, perpendicular to, et cetera... These would be another great enhancement to the tool. Some of this is already implemented and supported when editing, why not latch onto that same functionality and leverage it for other tools?

Hopefully the ArcGIS Desktop team is listening, and hopefully many of those little technical usability enhancements like these, that have been in the CAD world for years will begin to make it into the ESRI fold as well.