About the flexibility of the tool properties placement.
Indeed, it can be confusing, but blender have static window arrangement because of custom UI.
This is because blender is cross-platform, so this solution allows to it to be stable independently of platform and its window server.
For example, 3dsmax is win only, but I guess you remember how long it took to it to brew a proper support for floating toolbars.
It is pretty much hard to find crossplatform software that supports things like floating toolbars properly, usually it takes a lot of time to brew such a thing.
So Blender has got such kind of a solution, that works stable at any platform, but looking strange.