Aligning anything outside the .osu/.osb. I found a rhythm where I took each individual name properly left aligned, and then went into the .osu and changed all the coordinates of each name. It wasn't that much of a hassle because I expected all the elements to be in one areas throughout the song. But I can imagine cases where it gets more complicated. If I have sprites that are in multiple areas on the screen like if we wanted to make a shape like a pentagon. Imagine if we had to make such a shape out of hitnotes, but grid snap and distance snap didn't exist, and the actual note's position didn't accurately adjust in real time. That's what moving things in the design editor feels like.
I know we're assumed to edit things from the notepad. But the elements do not auto sort by location on the timeline. they get added to the .osu/.osb as you include them in the timeline. So the things you're trying to edit may be scattered around the list of objects in no meaningful order. We also have to get used to parsing time into ms. We know where it is in the editor, we have to search for it in the .osb. Once we find it and make changes, we have to reload the map with the changes. If we make any changes outside of the notepad copy, you need to reopen it with notepad with the changes for each saved change. I can imagine that getting tedious quite fast.
I think there's enough need for the ability to accurately place objects on the timeline without the need to manually change xy coordinates.
Unless there's some miracle fix somewhere or you can make it so selected objects show their xy coordinate up in the coordinate information instead of always showing your cursor coordinates. That would be an alternative and that's really the main issue of this suggestion.