Thanks aphoria, and meek for the welcome back. I'm surprised you want me back, I'm never satisfied!

I'm not a mathematically-inclined person, so wasn't able to explore the ramifications of what I'm asking for in my head until I'd made an example.

The sample shows the difficulty.
This particular angle would require four gridspaces to resolve. Which means, I guess that the number of bricks that would have to be added to accommodate it would exponentially expand the complexity of the toolbox.

Not to speak of the problem of the interstices. Most of the other bricks would not abutt!

I think in this particular instance I really am howling at the moon. Perhaps I should go off and study Persian tiles or something...

I reckon you could cut about a third of the bricks from the toolbox by keying submenus off all the bricks that rotate. That is, each rotating brick icon would have a button -- a la some of Photoshop's tools for instance -- that when clicked would reveal the other three rotations.

In this way a degree of user-friendliness would be retained for those who are new to the site, but you could also have hot keys for the rotations for those who prefer a more efficient access.

I reckon the user's selection box should be a floating palette like the others, and not in the brick palette itself. It could then be big enough to retain a lot of bricks without scrolling, yet not get in the way. Particularly if the palette can be stretched horizontally or vertically.

@nemoorange: yes, I'm in two minds myself. One of the things I love about Fontstruct is that it is so user-friendly; it's Lego for grownups. I think the user-interface is utterly brilliant. There's something deeply engaging about grabbing those bricks and plonking them where you want them.

I suppose there's something commensurate happening when you create postscript outlines in Illustrator. Whoever concieved the idea of the stretchy handles was brilliant. But Illustrator gives you absolute, total freedom which is rather daunting. To me, anyway. And you need to know rather a lot of stuff before you can get anywhere.

It would be very sad if in, say, five years time, a newbie coming to Fontstruct is confronted by a thicket of decisions before anything can get made. Sometimes upgrades disimprove as well as improve. I'd hate that to happen to Fontstruct.

The other half of me champs at the bit. It was such a relief to get the two new brick shapes; they facilitated so much I haven't been able to do before. Such would be the case with a third angle to play with. Not only would you get a new pitch for your downstrokes, but the transitions between angles could be smoothed out a lot. At the cost of rather a lot more complexity in the brick palette.

I know Fontstruct is meant to be modular, but for better or worse, the songs I want to sing don't stick to the hymnsheet.

Meek's notion of an "expert" mode makes sense to me. Good luck with the programming, ha ha!

@meek: teaching grandmother to suck eggs dept:
One possibility for future development might be to have a certain degree of user-defined choice. InDesign offers this with the "save workspace" option. In my case it would be handy to have a show/hide bricks option so I can ditch bricks I never use from the bricks palette. I don't believe I've ever used the stars, for instance. I could hide them to make room for the bricks I do use. There are a lot of others I only use rarely. If I could easily show or hide bricks, I could free up plenty of space for the gazillions that I do use.
The advantage of a "save workspace" function would be to allow me to recall my desktop layout with one action instead of laboriously rearranging the furniture every time I work on a font. It's irksome to have to tell Fontruct to show guides, (more than one for the horizontal orientations would be good: l/c ascender top; cap X height, lower case X height and descender alignments make four!); and show adjacent characters every time I start work.

Impossible dream dept: brickstacking. I know it started life as a glitch, but it's the babel fish of Fontstruct. Is it too mindbendingly hard to facilitate a process that lets you brickstack and copy to/from the clipboard? I know, tell me to go away.