Why must the messy code win in this case? Building a transform tool should be a pretty well understood problem. Just take a look at what photoshop's transform

Why must the messy code win in this case? Building a transform tool should be a pretty well understood problem. Just take a look at what photoshop's transform tool does and you will see all the possible extensions you might need to support in the future (rotate, skew, distort, perspective, warp, transform origins, a bajillion modifier hotkeys, etc). Of course don't go ham and support all of them up front. But with those future use cases in mind, it's pretty hard to write yourself into a corner. I would say Dan's refactoring looks fine other than needing more customization for positioning and handle behavior. But it seems easy enough to just add them later.