The lathe and extrude along a curve tools in Blender are a bit unconventional and difficult to find. Could these be added to the modifier stack?

Currently it is possible to get results comparable to global illumination with the internal renderer but they require a lot of tweaking such as setting up a light dome and/or to apply radiosity. Until now using an external renderer such as yafray or kerkythea is a workable alternative. However, I still prefer the internal renderer as this is more tightly integrated. For example, cancelling the render process works without a problem with the internal renderer, with yafray this seems more difficult. Other problems are the difference between the light settings needed for yafray and needed for the internal renderer. That makes it difficult to create a quick preview using the internal renderer and then use the external renderer for the final picture. Therefore I propose to either adapt the internal renderer to have features comparable to GI, or to improve the integration of an external renderer.

Currently there are two methods to manipulate a selection, i.e. using the handles (which can be changed using CTRL ALT GKEY, CTRL ALT SKEY and CTRL ALT RKEY) and using the mouse after typing the GKEY, SKEY or RKEY. It is not clear why two different sets of shortcut keys are used. Why not change the handle after using GKEY, SKEY and RKEY?