Kyatric - To clarify. I have seen level editors (even followed a tutorial on making one with indielib and C++) that apply sprites in similar fashion to how, photshop applies a paintbrush texture. Thus, this is why I called it level painting. You select a sprite, set the desired spacing, rotation setting, whether the object should be rotated to correspond to the direction of the brush stroke, etc. It's much the same as a tile editor except that it doesn't follow a grid. Ultimately, using the an absolute spacing setting and rotation only on 90 degrees one can turn this "painter" editor into a normal tile map if one desired. Does this make sense?
Arima - Did you end up making your own level editor? I have heard of doing this ( Konjak said he made a custom editor in his blog) and was curious how involved it is. I have been hesitant thus so far because I don't know JS. I have worked with c++,C#,VB but I am trying to stay focused on spending my time in "useful" things. As it is I am prone to distraction and learning a new language wouldn't speed up the development time which has already been lengthy)
All and all, I might try taking the tile map plugin and"fixing" it to my needs... but I was really hoping to avoid that. On an entirely separate note.... If I were to replace a tile map with a bunch of sprites (I would do this via events at start up)... would that be less efficient than the tile map is?