Does it happen for anyone who upvoted this in recent versions of Illustrator?
I remember it happening, but it seems it’s no longer broken.

Tom, does this still happen for you in the latest versions of Ai? Does not for me. Can you verify that, please?

At some point in the last week (version 25.0.1) right clicking on a selection and applying "Transform>Reflect" opens up the reflect UI panel but instead of defaulting to horizontal or vertical, it's defaulting to "Angle" and a completely random number. Constantly having to correct this is a right faff.

It's tricky to recreate but has happened multiple times over the last few days. In this case reflecting a cat 50.9 degrees!?

Maybe I'm just the only one!

Yep, same happens with Scale! I believe this is related with moving the object in-between dialogue calls... Can you help me in catching this? What steps should a user perform to have this gibberish instead of previous value?

In illustrator 25 rotation tool doesn't work well. It doesn't remember previous value, and set a random value every time
Like this
R-Return or double click on tool

今までのリフレクトツールは前回使用した「リフレクトの軸」が記憶されており、使うたびに決めなおす必要がありませんでした。しかし、アップデート後に使おうとすると、使用時のダイアログで設定が一定ではなく、毎回変わってしまい困っています。水平・垂直が変わるだけでなく、角度の任意の数値まで毎回異なる状態です。リフレクト軸を前回と同じ設定で使うなら、ダイアログが出てもいちいち確認せずreturnキーを押すだけで素早く反転できていたので、ちゃんと前の設定のまま使える様に戻してもらいたいです。

It seems to be doing it in a few places now eg the reflect tool does it sometimes too ie when I go in to use it it'll have a random angle selected even if I've just been using horizontal or vertical beforehand.

I can't seem to consistently reproduce it - it seems to randomly come and go even within the same file and the same session (which to my mind makes absolutely no sense whatsoever!).

I guess its at least consistent in its inconsistency! :-)

No, not really - it seems kind of random. I just tried it and it didn't do it, so its kind of weird. The process I almost always do is...

Select object
Double click rotate tool in toolbox
Enter value or use what's there (and used to always be the last used)

I wouldn't care quite so much if it defaulted to say 90 because that would at least occasionally be useful but the chances of me wanting it to be a completely random and non-sensical value that I haven't used for anything is well... nil

I notice this when I use Scale tool... I think they are related.
Can you provide steps that 100% reproduce that bug for you?

in Illustrator 24.2 the rotate tool often seems to default back to random numbers now instead of to the last used or something that might make sense (eg 90). eg 93.24

macOS Catalina 10.15.5
AI CC 24.2

Using Reflect to transform several objects. Prior settings don't persist when opening the Reflect dialog box. Instead AI randomly changes between Horizontal, Vertical and Angle settings. Please fix.