Did you try left clicking toward the top of the note? Where the velocity tool appears.

Left clicking on a particular part of the note is difficult, since I do most of my note editing on the fly (during playback), and most of my note editing involves drum hits, which are very short.

Moving the event inspector onto the piano roll is not an ideal solution either, since it would sit on top of the piano roll even when not needed. Perhaps if there were a quick way to show/hide the event inspector, it would be less obtrusive, but it would still be a lot less convenient than a simple right click to open note properties. I might as well use the select tool instead of the smart tool.

Cakewalk had an efficient, intuitive system before: right click anywhere in a note to open the note properties. I wish they could give us the option to have that back.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

I know what the event inspector is: http://www.cakewalk.com/D...Req=ControlBar.13.html

My piano roll view takes up my entire second monitor (to reduce my need to scroll, since I edit during playback). If I drag the event inspector onto that monitor, the event inspector will obscure some part of the piano roll view, which is undesirable. I would then need to show/hide the event inspector each time I want to edit note properties. This involves additional key presses and/or mouse clicks, which I am trying to avoid (otherwise, I'd simply switch to the select tool instead of the smart tool).

Is that clearer?

This is still bugging me in Sonar Platinum. 
 
In the Piano Roll View, when you have the smart tool selected, is there any way to have right clicking a note  open the note properties instead of deleting a note? 

I will try the click-hold, but I'm not sure it will work well, since I usually edit notes on the fly (during playback).

The smart tool in Platinum remains incredibly dumb.   Mapping function to click in accordance with how we want the tool to work would be so much better.   And the notion of trying to hit exactly the right part of a note to get the right function remains one of the things that regularly makes me curse sonar.   
 
Right click to delete, I've gotten almost used to it.  But it is inconsistent with Windows, so moving from application to application, and remembering the sonar is the idiot child, is sometimes still hard to do.