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The biggest problem I have with the UML designer at present is the fact that, to fit enough information on screen to do something useful, everything is too small to read. Scrolling around requires constant mouse gestures - it makes for a serious usability problem. Something that would make it much more usable would be non-linear magnification - basically, a magnification area that tracks the mouse. A good starting point for researching this: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~tkeahey/research/nlm/nlm.html
For diagrams,we now have a navigator. The navigator for a diagram now shows an overview window. In the navigator window, you can move around the diagram as well as zoom the diagram. Will this solve this use case?
Created attachment 34876 [details] Demostration of how the navigator works with the UML diagrams
Neat use of navigator - it definitely looks useful. At the same time, it's not the same thing as non-linear magnification (i.e. one view serves as both the overview and the detail view). So if you don't mind I'd prefer we leave this enhancement open; at some point perhaps we can try mocking up real non-linear magnification and determine if it would solve the problem.