Implementing sensible automatic layout of large graphs is a big challenge. Most design tools ultimately delegate this task to the user, by working from a small number of principles: 1) provide a "best effort" initial layout 2) allow the user to transform this into something that actually makes sense 3) take great care not to break the users layout when adding/moving/removing nodes, eg. preserve as much of the manual layout as possible 4) provide a number of tools to aid in manual layout: grouping, multiselect->center horizonal, center vertical etc. In my experience this is the only workable approach for large graphs, and the spring facet should support this way of working. Problems with current version 1) it performs an automatic re-layout from time to time 2) the tools to manually layout the graph are not adequate