There is a complication with published/unpublished state and permissions on columns in that we currently count an check them and check consistency within the row. Not impossible to deal with but something we'd need to take account of.
I’m not sure I follow the relationship between elements and columns you mentioned. Are you referring to the items under "Page Structure Elements"? For other sections like "Core Content Fields" or "Images and Links", I don't see where the element/column conflict would arise.
Regarding the sizing - a few days ago I was looking at the backend of someone's site (not sure if it was yours) and the backend template was making everything smaller and positioning was a bit strange. Was this yours?
Yes, that might be my site. I use a
user.css file for the Joomla backend because I find the default font sizes way too large for my taste.
However, I don't think that's related to the small elements in EasyLayouts. Even when I disable /media/templates/administrator/atum/css/user.css, those elements remain very small and sometimes hard to handle.
What I may do to start with is implement these features for rows (adding in an easy option to clone/copy a row and all its content) and then look at extending it later.
I understand the technical challenge, but I hope you can implement it at the element level, as that's where the real layout control is. There is no immediate rush, but I wanted to share these thoughts to help improve the tool's flexibility in the long run.