I wonder if something like this would've worked. I always mentally think of flex box as having a primary axis that's like a rope that runs through the container, and the children are stuck onto this rope.

```

display: flex;

// The flex axis is the axis where items get added. So horizontal would add things to the right, vertical to the bottom

flex-axis: horizontal;

flex-axis-align: center;

// Normal as used in math to mean perpendicular to the curve

flex-normal-align: center;

```

Or `flex-align: center;` for short.

This would give a decently simpler mental model with only three terms: the flex axis, the flex normal, and the alignment.

And actually it would allow some interesting natural extensions! You could do `flex-axis: path(...)` to specify an arbitrary curve to position your elements on.

Any edge cases I'm missing as to why this wouldn't work?