Allow Free Distort like Photoshop

Question

In Photoshop, you can pull an image's control handles around to your heart's content, and fine tune the distortion to line up with a perspective grid. In Illustrator, you can only distort the bounding box of the whole shape, so once you move a single control handle, you lose control of one or more corners of the image, making precise distortions almost impossible. The best we have right now is the Effect > Distort & Transform > Free Distort tool, but there's no preview, so again, you can't line up the shape with a perspective grid.
Please make Illustrator's Free Distort tool like Photoshop's!

Answer 1

OK....so it's three years on from that original post (and the problem was around for years before that). We have seen all kinds of silly unnecessary fluff appear in the versions of Illustrator since then, but this fundamental bug still remains. It's such an important part of any workflow, and is so well implemented by the Adobe folks at Photoshop and After Effects. If anyone who programs Illustrator is reading this, please PLEASE admit that you're really not very good - just go Effect > Distort & Transform > Free Distort to see what I mean (look at that interface! Where's the Preview? Is this chunk of code from the 1980s?). Please swallow your misplaced pride, and ask one of the AE or PS people to do your job for you - properly. They'd probably fix the problem in 5 minutes. Admit it to yourself, your 'O' level in BASIC programming from 1979 just won't cut it any more.
We all know that AI is a piece of junk - old bits of hastily cobbled-together code from various vintages, so please concentrate on just making it NOT SUCK, before you try to add a veneer of shiny new features to distract people from the underlying problems this piece of bloatware has. It really needs re-writing from the ground up, just not in COBOL or FORTRAN.
....not that this will go anywhere...what am I going to do? Use FreeHand instead?! Ugh. The joys of a monopoly.
If EVERYONE who faces this problem in Illustrator submits a bug report (because it IS a bug - surely this is not "as designed"?!), maybe someone might take notice, and in another 3 years' time, the problem might get fixed. We can live in hope.....
I haven't ploughed through every post in this thread, so it might have been mentioned already...but there is a kind-of (not very good) workaround, using Object > Envelope Distort > Make with Mesh (and set the mesh to 1x1). The corners have stupid Bezier handles, which won't go away, even using the Anchor Point Tool, so it will try to warp/bend the thing all over the place. But with some careful faffing around, and assuming you don't mind the artwork ending up a bit bent, you can get almost acceptable results.