I definitely agree that FT has a great deal of potential. I'm always interested in feedback. The biggest problem with taking feedback, of course, is that I may not get around to implementing anything for quite a while. I'm currently working on about three other projects at the moment and FT is number 4. Plus, I'm about to have an infant in the house and that's going to mess with so many things (sleep and sanity, for instance)...

Hmmm... I don't normally use the little auxiliary globe at all, so I tend to forget about it. When I want to see a globe, I set the projection to Orthographic and use the pan tool. Spinning the orthographic display on the main part of the screen is just a matter of holding down the shift key while clicking and dragging.

MojoWorld is a procedural world generator and renderer from Pandromeda ( http://www.pandromeda.com/ - the site's not working for me at the moment, though). It offers the feature that you requested in the form of a "parameter bomb", an area of a world that's affected by another world's definition. The original version of MojoWorld limited the feature to circular areas on the surface; I haven't played with it since version 1.0 (actually a pre-release version), so I don't know if the definition was expanded or not. Your description and mine are of the same sort of feature, but allowing arbitrary shapes.

The units of the Global Smooth and Feather Selection operations are the same: sigmas. Not a terrible useful description, I know, but it's how the blur code that I originally used was defined. Figure very roughly 2 editing units per sigma.

Tools>>Actions>>Create Mound From Selection is a tool that will fill the currently-selected area of the offset channel with a shapeburst gradient from the minimum specified to the maximum. The "Gamma" parameter controls the non-linearity of the result. Draw a selection and try using a minimum of 0 and a maximum of -10000 with a gamma of 10. To gain experience with the tool, try it on a flat world with a moderately high editing resolution.

When you select one of the painting tools, there should be a "Paintbrush Options" toolbar that appears. On this toolbar is a button that is just marked "C". Click this button to get the "Edit Paintbrush Settings" dialog. Set "Form" to "Image" and then select a file in "Image Brush" to be used as your brush. The brightness of the image controls the height of the result (black=0, white="Value" on the "Paintbrush Options" toolbar.