Created attachment 8756 mockup I would like to recommend the addition of three new entries into the mode drop down list in the display tab of the panel properties dialog. The three new entries are 'Horizontal bottom', 'Vertical right' and 'Deskbar right'. In addition to these three new entries, the existing entries would be changed to 'Horizontal top', 'Vertical left' and 'Deskbar left'. The reason for this is to simply the movement of the panel to the opposite side of the screen, which presently requires the panel to first be unlocked and then manually moved. A video explaining this suggestion can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-XHI6_37A&t=92s
While your suggestion is understandable, you can - in theory - position a panel anywhere on the screen, even in the center. The "orientation" in this case really is just that, irrespective of the position. I don't think we can easily "fix" this, apart from maybe providing better documentation and guidance. (I don't see removing the flexibility in terms of positioning the panel as an option to be honest.)
Yes you can position it anywhere on the screen, but i've yet to see someone position it anywhere else but the corners and the suggest is to make it easy for them to do the positioning. Hard to believe that it would be that difficult to do when we have panel presets which have these same positioning set in them, like the Redmond positioning it at the bottom.
It's really not that simple and as I said involves dropping the code around freely positioning the panel. Otherwise that drop-down would remain confusing. I could imagine adding a second drop-down to select between [top|bottom|left|right|free] but even that isn't much fun to code... From my point of view simply not worth it.
Sorry now i better understand what you mean. Have you seen a situation where there is a need to be able to freely position the panel?
No for me personally aligning panels at the screen borders would suffice. However, in many years of working on Xfce and trying to fix bugs I've come to realize that users *often* have use-cases that I don't have or even understand. Of course not everything needs to be supported and not every use-case is meaningful. I'm not even sure if it's easy to reach the same usability for positioning the panel. You can take a look at lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings UI to see an alternative for how to do panel positioning. Personally I prefer the Xfce panel's drag-and-drop approach.