the whole distort family effects would need some love, but the mesh warp could be a super powerful tool if could :
-have access to every points and tangeants positions
-lasso select points
-scale, shear, rotate the grid to affect only a part of the image
-making it 3d
-promote it to b 32bpc gpu accelerated
-go beyond those request and make it a weapon of choice
to my knowledge this effect has been change only once to be able to move points with arrow keys...