Matisse First Impressions

My compliments to the Matisse crew (and a hat tip to those who have walked this path before). This is truly what a layout editor should look like. Thanks for examining prior art and learning from it. I now have a few projects that now have a netbeans project folder and extra .form files.

That said, here are a few bumps I've run into so far...

Custom Component Creation
Rather than inline code in the XML form, initComponents should either take arguments or simply rely on field contents. Putting the code in XML makes it infeasible to automatically refactor. For example, I have a filename text field that provides a browsing action synched to the editability/enabled state of the text field. So to create the button, I need

new JButton(field.getBrowseAction())

I'd rather just create the component myself prior to initComponents(), and have initComponents() know that that field has already been initialized. Perhaps split between initializing and doing the layout?

Changing Component Names
If you edit the member field name for a component, you don't get a corresponding refactor of the code.

Alternate Components in Layout
I'm trying to figure out the best way to swap out two different panels. One has just a password, one has a filename and a password. I'd like to swap between the two and have the layout still work, but the layout assumes that the component hierarchy is static. I'll probably just set up a container panel with the appropriate resizing attributes, then add/remove the alternates as needed.

Strings
I should be able to substitute a string lookup for a hard-coded string, whether in labels or text fields or whatever. Granted, I can override whatever happens in initComponents, but then I'm maintaining the same string twice - once in my string/properties tables, and again in the UI designer.

Cross-Panel alignment
Sometimes I'd like to operate on a number of components as a group (resize the right edge, for instance) and this doesn't seem possible. It'd be nice if the alignment lines could be inferred and then themselves could be draggable. Putting things into sub-panels has the unfortunate side-effect that you can only align with other things in that panel.

Grid Size/Spacing
I'm surprised this one got through. I'm stuck with 10 pixel margins that I can't change. So my choices are 10 or 0 pixels. Ugh. There's a preference for Grid X/Grid Y, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.