I think what we are edging toward is an application of vertex groups and weight painting to manual editing of the geometry. This would be very welcome.
Example workflow: select or make a vertex group active. From somewhere - maybe the proportional editing menu - choose the option ‘weighted’ (just like ‘connected’) now when an element is moved the weight painted vertices follow according to their weight, essentially proportional editing with a custom falloff shape.
This has a large benefit over hiding which often results in unusable results because there is no blend between hidden and edited vertices.
This would be very similar to masking procedures in sculpting. In fact the workaround for not having this in edit mode is to go to sculpt and use a mask.
@K H - at least no one’s calling them verticles here…
I think it would actually be a time consuming process if you need to change selections frequently, I’d rather something like this be made as quick and with as few steps as possible.
Better not bring the requirement to use vertex groups for general editing tools (leaving it mainly for things like modifiers and animation).
Wings3D, even though it’s just a poly modeler and limited in some ways, still has a few features up on Blender. One of them has to do with magnet operations. It’s a bit like proportional editing but still different in some ways. (Even has magnet masking.) You can also save selections and cycle through them with hotkeys, “vertex groups” are one of the types of saved selections.
I often just model in it, and then import stuff to Blender.
It’s also FOSS software if you care to check it out. Maybe the Blender devs could still learn a few modest little tricks from it.
Other than that, there might be a Blender plugin that does what you need. Unfortuanely I don’t know which one it may be.
I disagree with the idea being presented that ngons are bad for modelling. I won’t argue they’re bad for rendering, bad for animation, and bad for texturing but modelling is a process and ngons are very useful in that process. Anyone who is serious about modelling knows about Bay Raitt. See if you can count the number of ngons created and then removed in later steps in the following video:
Further GIFs can be found here. Ngons immensely simplify block modelling (yes, a still commonly used technique) and are, like everything else, a tool with positives and negatives. So long as you remove them from your model before the rendering, animation, texturing, etc - their positives far outweigh the negatives.
++1000 This is what I failed to say in my quickly written reply just because your final model is going to end up all quad that suddenly doesn’t mean you can’t use n-gons and triangles while you model. But even in final pro models I have spotted n-gons and triangles one that I can recall is McQueen from Cars there is an n-gon in his A pillar but would I know that if I hadn’t seen the wire frame(this wire frame is on fx-guide)?