Originally posted by Shurenai:

Originally posted by TehJumpingJawa:

In fact additional rotation & scaling controls would allow the construction palette to be shrunk, as a significant portion of the existing components would become redundant.

While true, I would hope that the existing palette remains as is. While you could indeed rotate a vertical beam for example to be horizontal, having to do so every time you want a horizontal beam would be annoying.

You could easily have hotkeys that snap to common orientations.