John-M, You might be right about some folk not understanding of how the control points work. That does seem to be what underlies the desire to change their shape. I can see the use of being able to adjust the shape but one can always adjust effective overall shape by adding copies of the same point, …
HOWEVER, I do understand how they work, having used them for at least ten years (since Capture NX) and the way they work in PL doesn’t satisfy me. It’s a disappointment for me because I depend on it working well for editing my beach calligraphy shots. I’m attaching two screenshots where I have the mask / selection shown. The left monitor shows PL and I have the same image open in Capture NX2 on the right with the same selections points at the same size and in the same position. The first one only has one selection point in the shadow. Notice how much less defined the selection of the shadows is in PL.
In the second example I have a control point on the highlights and one of those negative ones on the shadows. Notice how poorly selected the shadows are. You can see a dark area around the negative selection point whereas in Capture NX2 you wouldn’t be able to tell where that second control point is if it weren’t for the marker.
This problem leaves the PL control points almost useless to me in many cases.
