I really really really think that you’re overthinking this waaay too much. There isn’t a general concept of how things are to be sized, it’s more of a (visual) design choice (you can kind of get the idea by watching Tom’s streams where he’s resizing stuff based on detail level/sometimes symmetry). So if flowers work better as 2x2, they’re not scaled up to 3x3 or down to 1x1 because there’s a door that’s 3x1 or a table that’s 3x3. In the end, you have to live with the fact that there will always be things that don’t add up - that’s the issue with tile based games.
In the end, the mining tool is 4x5x4 because the average guy is about 3.5 blocks tall and shafts are usually square (as is about everything in the world when you come to think about it: it’s made out of cubes). The size is also convenient for digging up lots of space, which is required to get lots of stone.
I honestly won’t mind if the 2x2 never gets changed (though you already changed it) if the tool can move by one block rather than requiring 2 blocks. I think that just exacerbated the unintuitive nature of the tool as it is now.
It was introduced just in this Alpha (I think?) so it’s pretty new. The way things are going, they focus on breadth of features, not depth - so unless it’s something completely hindering development (like the GUI overhaul somewhere around Alpha 4 I think), it’s likely not “refined” until a later point. This fits for oh so many things, not just mining.
I don’t doubt that we’ll see proper mining at some point, but the answer to “when” is likely “no idea yet, sorry”.
Yep. That’s why I’m giving feedback. I expect Radiant will give us more refined tools for mining as they refine this implementation. I have to play around with it more to get a real sense of how things work and don’t work.
Unfortunately, I’m frequently hampered by bugs, but that is the nature of Alpha.