I has got two questions - does SmartF have user base, and what situations it is useful.

The issue is/was: It's difficult to justify 2 addons that do essentially the same function being in Blender. Both addons have a user base, both can useful in different situations and provide elements each other does not. They also use the same hotkey so there's the potential for key map issues.
As we need to solve this I think the only way is this.
1/ Update F2 to the version here: https://github.com/Cfyzzz/Other-scripts/blob/master/f2%2028%201-8-4.py
2/ Add SmartF as provided by @CansecoGPC (CansecoGPC) with a warning not to enable F2 addon

Maybe it would be better to have them separated

I could add it as an update for you but we prefer for the new Authors/maintainers to be accountable for their own addons. Please let us know how you wish to proceed.

As CG workflow desiger, I am an author of concept of F2 tool. I work with different local python developers, ordering different concepts of tools to them, so development of F2 is under my maintain, but was written by several developers.
Yes, I would like it to be updated from Cfyzzz Github (at least once). That would be awesome.
F2 2.8 version

Changed Panel from it's own tab to Edit and panel name to SmartF.
Only call prop imports needed.

In T51049#700287, @Brendon Murphy (meta-androcto) wrote:

hi, thanks very much, Can you please check with nightly builds to make sure code is working correctly, I don't see any issue, but it's worth regular checking.
Have you looked at https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Tools/Git and https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Developer_Intro/Overview ? Are you prepared to maintain the addon within Blender through the 2.8 series? Let me know so we can look at your access to the addons repository.

hi @Paul Kotelevets (1D_Inc),
Thank you for your detailed response, we appreciate your time and input on this. I consider you the expert on the f2 addon functionality.

Hi there. Thanks for inviting.

hi, thanks very much, Can you please check with nightly builds to make sure code is working correctly, I don't see any issue, but it's worth regular checking.
Have you looked at https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Tools/Git and https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Developer_Intro/Overview ? Are you prepared to maintain the addon within Blender through the 2.8 series? Let me know so we can look at your access to the addons repository.
There could be a couple more things to do here. I've had discussion with @Paul Kotelevets (1D_Inc) and he's still advocating the f2 addon. Given it's included in smartf we maybe could address the issue further.

For active element and 3D cursor pivot point, simply following the setting seems ok. For the default median center, I'd rather it do something a bit smarter since that's basically never where you want the spin center to be.

All I’m saying is that it should simply follow the pivot point setting. Different pivots may be appropriate in different situations, so hardcoding it to 3D cursor isn’t great.

Using the active element for all pivot point settings except 3D cursor would be an improvement for vertex and edge select mode I think.

@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) Just FYI, this is by default what happens with default cube using 3D Cursor:

For active element I think it's fine to default to the active element. But I would be nice that if you go into edit mode, select one face of the cube, and activate the spin tool, drag the (+) button, it actually does something useful.

@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) Luckily we have a pivot point option called Active Element, which is most useful for spin:

I think it would make sense if the default spin center is derived from the selection without taking the 3D cursor into account, but not necessarily at the center of the selection. I'm not sure what the right formula is though.

You very often want to spin around a vertex. This would be trivial if you could set the Pivot Point to Active Element.

Can confirm the behavior, same happens in 2.79.
I think this will go for the boundingbox of the entire object in that case, will check...

Just chiming making flat objects then making them 3dish in blender 2.8 is a huge mess.

I can confirm this bug! Its very annoying. But it occours only, if faces are smooth shaded. If there are flat shaded, it works.

There is not much point in re-activating closed tasks like that, it is fairly unlikely to be the same issue actually( even though the symptoms are the same, code has changed quiet a bit since then).

Confirm. broken again. Today build 24.05.

Is been almost a month now, and is not even treated as an high bug... guys I use blender for sculpting too and because of this problem I'm using a older version of the program...
I would love to get the new beta with this bug fixed. Please!

This is broken again

I think that this task is complete for now. We should start a new task for a real tool in the toolbar for a 2.81 or later. Since such tools are typically interactive, some possibilities would be:

• the modal "point normals at" command (maybe with custom gizmo to help)
• the modal "rotate normals" command (currently pretty hidden under rotate transform with n typed afterwards)
• a new modal "set face strength" command, to let you select and set multiple faces' strengths in sequence; ideally combined with custom drawing to show which faces have which strength
• maybe a way to display the numeric values (vector) of selected normals (like a 'measureit' for normals)?

Currently the normals menu commands all have a poll that tests for autosmooth being on. That poll should be removed and the code should just test and turn it on if not already on when those menu items are invoked. I looked once at doing this automatically in the bevel modifier when harden normals was chosen but it was annoying to do because the bevel code is all in a file that only operates on BMesh and there is no autosmooth option recorded in BMesh that could be set and propagated back to the Mesh in the modifier code. This could be corrected, of course.

Custom lnors data is already automatically added by the operators when needed, afaik. So it’s only a matter of enabling autosmooth too, when needed, that should be a rather trivial change? We could also do it when adding one of the normal editing modifiers, actually…

Computing the median normal indeed seems expensive. It may not be too terrible in practice as custom normals are mostly used for relatively low poly meshes, and it could be in a subpanel that is collapsed by default. But still, it can be an issue.

It is working in 2.8 build of 2019-05-13

I can confirm. Same bug here too. Multires not refreshing properly.

Suggest to first try add a tool in the tool-system for this instead of buttons in the items panel.

One question about the idea of making the normal vector in the transform tools item panel be a live reflection of the current selection: this is a not-inexpensive operation (see BM_loop_normal_editdata_array_init in bmesh_mesh.c: it allocates several #loop-length things and iterates over all the loops of the mesh). Even if we only do this if there are custom normals, is there any concern about doing this every time a selection changes? I don't think so, but wonder what others think before going down this coding path.

This is an issue because of buggy drivers. Sadly, there will be no more driver updates for your GPU and we do not support hardware this old anymore: https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/

@Howard Trickey (howardt) I suppose we could keep them but just let the user type in a value in the redo panel.

@William Reynish (billreynish) Yes, I can see that (the copy/paste buffer being elsewhere and hidden).
What were the thoughts about Add/Multiply? Dump them?

@Howard Trickey (howardt) We think we might want to change the Normal Vector number field to actually reflect what you select, just like other things in the Transform panel. That was the idea during the UI meeting we had this morning. Does that make sense?

I agree with most of this, and have been working on it. With changes I made to the normal menu, I can now remove Face Strength from the Normals panel in Tool properties.