I've done more investigating and discovered a few things. When inserting a note using the pencil tool, it's not that difficult to place it at the right part of the beat the first time as the snap is "stuck" at 60 (assuming a timebase of 480). Although with smaller staff sizes, it gets more inaccurate.
The problem of lassoing and dragging is a bit more complicated. If you hold the CTRL key and the left mouse button and drag, there's usually not a problem landing on the staff space or line that you want, you have to keep your eye on the black box with the cursor location and try not to be a 32nd note off.
But if you hold the CTRL key and hold down both mouse buttons, which is what you do when you want Sonar to take into account chromatic, rather than diatonic, movement, things get more messy. Say you are dragging to the right a group of notes beginning on E-flat. Drag it to the next measure, with both mouse buttons pressed (the left should be pressed slightly before the right button) and if you notice the cursor in the black box, you'll see only diatonic notes, but when you let go at the beat and note value you want, Sonar will make that note chromatic. There is a logic to this because that's what the 2-button mouse press is for: chromatic notes. But because the cursor box shows only diatonic notes, it gets very confusing.
These issues are not as bad as my OP, I hadn't investigated it deeply enough at the time as I was in the middle of composing. The immediate bug fix is that the cursor should reflect the movement between say, e and e-flat, or f and f#. That would made dragging much easier. The other issue is that the snap feature should have the option to match the snap to the note length, albeit with the ability to easily override this. Then Sonar's staff view will be much better midi editing and sequencing tool.
Jerry
www.jerrygerber.com