There appears to be a difference between Mac and Windows. If you click-release, mouse over the scene, the incoming component’s origin is lined up with the cursor, on Mac and Windows. If instead you click-drag, on Windows it still is lined up with the cursor, but on Mac it’s offset approximately the distance between the Components panel and the top left of the document window.
That’s something that could be fixed, but for now, click-release, then move the component out into your scene, and its location will make sense.
Yes, if I drag and drop vs click and release I also get a strange offset between the cursor and the insertion point. It doesn’t seem to be the offset @colin stated, but the effect is there.
Like Steve, I’m on Mac - Mojave plus SU 2021.1.278.
I had noticed the same behaviour previously for any component dragged out of the component browser (not imported nor a DC - any component present in the model) - a green circle with white plus sign a long way from the component origin - but hadn’t connected it with dragging it out rather than click then place. I thought for a while it was just random, and couldn’t see a pattern to it. Sometimes it seemed to work properly, sometimes not.
As Colin says, click then place works properly. Drag doesn’t.
My recollection (from more than six years ago when I used Windows) that SU would place a component either from its origin point, or if it had been moved or copied previously, from the last move origin point if that wasn’t the component origin.
What does ‘components were supposed to use only the local axes as insertion point…’?
By ‘local axes’, do you mean ‘component origin’, Christina?
Component definitions used to have an insertion point property. As you say it changed when using the Move tool. This was not at all transparent and highly confusing, and if my memory serves me it was removed and the insertion point changed to always just be the local origin.
My thinking is that something may not have been removed as it should. Maybe the Place tool still honors an existing insertion point, even if Move tool doesn’t set it, or something like that.
Having a model containing the component would help explore this.