When creating footprints from scratch (when needed) it would be nice to be able to pattern pads to a given X Y dimension.
For instance: for a 288 pin BGA chip (just an example, not actually needing to do this right now) it would be useful to click "Pin Array" icon. A popup opens, that asks how many pins in the X direction and how many in the Y direction. It asks for pad spacing in X and Y direction as well. It asks for a naming convention on pin numbers as well (left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, etc).
we will provide the distribute array function at next big version, at now you can use the align function after you place the pads.