Yes sir, that is the Blender way for sure. Lots of stuff to pick from that will frustrate you. But you'll get the hang of it. What I like to do is open a fresh scene and with no goal in mind, just tinker with it, get a feel for all those gotcha's. Next time I use it I'll have to spend a bit of time messing with it anyways, but each time it gets easier and easier.
Hi Bill,
The Simple Deform Modifier is indeed not simple (but the deformations it makes are simple).
Use what you like, but the Simple Deform Modifier is great for making something circular (like a tire, for instance), because you can set the Bend to 360°. (I'd like to see you do that with Proportional Editing😉). The most commonly used alternative for that, is a Curve Modifier, but that always gets a bit messy, with a hole or overlap, that needs to be fixed.
...and I have no idea, what is meant by X-Axis is tangent to Y-Axis, sounds plain wrong, but maybe I am just missing the context (timestamp?)
It seems like Jonathan is saying the imaginary tangent between X and Y axis' is where we need to select to bend the plane.
Once we rotate the origin, that imaginary tangent is rotated onto the actual X or Y axis allowing us to now bend the plane.
That's my understanding when following along with the video, trying to do it myself