hmmm...seems to be yet another reason to update to 2008.
I actually do agree on z height...it seems useful but as I review my drawings of various spaces I've only used it in a very few instances.
As I work on this problem this morning, I have nailed down one of my primary issues: multiple 2D views of the same symbol. I do this quite a bit (shaded instruments on the floor, unshaded overhead, or if I'm modifying a house plot, black for instruments already hung, blue for stuff I'm adding). I've accomplished this in the past by duplicating the symbol and hatching the copy...but this makes it more complicated to keep track of inventory. For coloring "added" instruments I've dumped them into their own layer and turned on layer colors...but then I lose object specific coloring information because layer coloring overides *all* coloring, not just for one type of object. Classes seem like the way to go, but I can't figure out how to get the base of the symbol to live in multiple classes (the ETC S4 body symbol as opposed to the ETC 26, 36 symbols which simply reference the body symbol) so that the body hatches instead of just the text.