seriously though it's not that difficult or inconvenient, the fact that you can select and drag-copy makes up for the painting thing.
It works perfectly fine, save for one thing, and that's that you select a placed object by its entire bounding box rather than just clicking on opaque parts.
I agree, it gets in the way a lot, but I geuss it's not that much of a big deal. It does get really annoying when theres a lot of small objects next to each other though. But... I think ctrl or alt click selects the object under the top level one.