Imagine a tool that sits in the Tool Panel used for complex alignment. When you click the tool, Illustrator would enter an Align Mode that changed the way some things operate the way Isolation Mode changes things when activated.

In Align Mode, a panel would be displayed with options (below) Your cursor would allow you to select not only the elements you want to align, but also the point of reference for alignment. You would see the standard boundary box appear when selecting an element, but you could click one of the 9 reference points on the bounding box to indicate that you want to align that element by that point. Once you have all of your elements selected, you can ALT-click an element to act as the Destination. It will display the bounds box for the Destination element and let you pick the reference point from the 9 reference points in the bounding box.

In a side panel, you would have options that controlled how this would happen. For example. you could have the Ghost Result option selected to show what your alignment would look like by aligning the selected elements to the destination as ghosted previews (transparent). But you could also Ghost Source so you would see solid previews of your aligned items while the original positions would be ghosted. When it looks the way you want, click the apply button to apply the alignment.

This is one small piece of a much bigger and much more robust tool that would allow you to do all sorts of advanced alignment. Like Transform Alignments that matched size and/or rotations. It would allow you to do non-lineart distributions for distributing things like position, size, rotation. It would also allow you to see a distribution path between elements that you could micro adjust before applying. You could even change the distribution model so it did non-linear easing. All of this in one tool with the Align Mode. When you activate a different tool, you would exit Align Mode just like exiting Isolation Mode.

I have looked at all of the align/distribute user voice requests and every single one would benefit from this system. Please contact me for more information. I'm working on a demo to show how easy this would be.