Measurement Tool's scale is way off

I’d previously reported a bug along these lines for the release version of Ai, but I’m not sure if that feeds through to the beta version too, so here goes:

I have a document whose scale is 1:200. I have set the scale in the Dimension Tool Options to 1:200, and I can use the lovely Dimension Tool to happily add dimensions to anything and it gives an accurate dimension. Nice.

I want to get the area of certain parts (it’s a garden layout and I want to be able to figure out how many paving slabs etc. to order). Sadly there’s not an ‘area’ option in the Dimension Tool, so I have to resort to the ancient Measure Tool. Why have these two tools not been merged?? Isn’t it time to add features to the Dimension Tool and kill of the Measure Tool? Anyway…

If, using the (useless) Measure Tool, I try to get the length of something, it gives some figure based on nothing useful nor relevant. There is no way to set the scale of the Measure Tool, so we’ll politely ignore this. If, however, I want to get the area of something, lo and behold, I can do that, and also - bizarrely - set the scale for the area readings (why does this not apply to the distance reading too? One of those many ancient crappy quirks of Illustrator I guess). OK, so I set the scale to 1:200 and select the paved area to get the area readout. OK...it’s 0.11 square metres; a little over 1 foot x 1 foot. Ah - I see: What I need to do, for no apparent reason, is set the scale (in the Measure Tool, not the Dimension tool) to 1:200 MULTIPLIED BY 1:200….that is 1:40,000. Of course. Silly me. Now I actually get the true area: 54.66sq.m.

Right. Time to work on something else, so I open up another file. This one’s scale is 1:10, so I set the Dimension Tool scale to 1:10 and happily work on that.

Time to go back to my garden layout. What’s the length of that section? Dimension Tool….oh, that’s wrong...ARGH! The scale is still set to 1:10! Why?! We all know this document’s scale is 1:200!

So my points are:

Could we PLEASE ensure Illustrator saves the document scale WITH THE DOCUMENT. It is ridiculous that Illustrator just remembers whatever the Dimension Tool’s most recently set scale is, regardless of the document.

Could we PLEASE get rid of the silly, misleading and pointless Measure Tool, and add the Area measurement to the Dimension Tool, and have it respect whatever scale is set in the Dimension Tool?