Instead of seeing a circle around the vertex that shows the approximate size of the proportional influence it should paint the affected vertices the way they’re gonna be affected. Like in weight paint mode where you can see a gradient of the vertex weights. Currently, the only way to know which vertices are gonna be affected is to transform the mesh to the extreme like fatten/shrink so you’re able to see the influence pattern on the vertices.
This is what I mean:
This is the way proportional editing currently looks like.
The simple circle doesn’t really help because the users can’t see which vertices are affected unless they actually start transforming them.
This is the way proportional editing should look like. This helps the users to understand which vertices are affected without having them transformed in any ways yet. Especially if they use different falloff types.
The second image is just a visualization of my idea, done with weight paint mode.