Both Scott Baker (@NewThinking2) and I have been having trouble in a complex model.
We want to be able to lock some existing parts of a big model, to prevent them moving by accident, but still need to be able to copy them.
We both frequently found, in spite of trying to be very careful, that things would move that we didn’t want to move after carefully placing them, but which we needed to copy elsewhere too.
If you have an unlocked component, with one or more locked sub component(s), you can still move the parent component and move its locked contents with it, though you can neither move them relative to each other or the parent, nor copy them individually.
But to be able to copy one of the subcomponents to another location, you have to unlock it too.
And then, particularly if it is nested a level or three down, it is fatally easy not to move far enough up the hierarchy before locking things again, and making a move.
In a smaller model, you could do this by dragging a new subcomponent out of the Component Browser.
But the component browser has many tens of thousands of components already, and the number is still growing. Just opening it takes tens of minutes on my machine, and still minutes on Scott’s faster iMac.
Neither the browser or the outliner are of any use in a model of this size, as SU completely slows to a halt if either is open.
Could there please be some additional status - for the moment, say, call if Freeze - which would allow you to copy a locked object, but not move it at all relative either to its parent, or to world axes?