Don't give up on the ball or box prop though. I use a box prop a lot for moving things around in my scene - such as getting people to walk. I set them up to walk in place rather than along a walk path. Say I am doing a group of marching wooden solders. I would set them up to march in place, parent them to a box prop, and then move the box by key frame through my scene so that they traveled as desired. Just hide box or make it black and transparent when done so it does not show on render. You can fake distance this way easy too, say start at 100% scale for the box and have them march slightly away from the camera, and shrink the scale on the box as you go so that when you get to the last frame they are vanishing out of sight into the horizon.

Now if the soldiers have clothing, you have to parent all that to the box as well if you plan to scale the box - or else parent the clothing to the figure which is what I do, and when the box moves/scales the figure the clothing as a child also moves/scales.

When working with a number of figures in a scene, I tend to parent everything to the figure so that I can work with it as a seperate unit. This also makes the hierarchy editor a bit easier to use since all props and clothing that goes to a figure is parent to that figure. Collapse or expand the tree for that figure to get to it or to shorten the HE so you can scroll down to find what you want.

Decide you like the way you have everything positioned and posed but wish you had placed it all 180 about to the light or slightly off to one side or whatever? Easy, load your ball or box prop, parent the individual sets to it, and use the box to rotate or move the entire scene and leave your lights as is. This is great for when you lights are nearly right but you want the shadows to fall just a tad more and it would be so much easier to turn the scene than reposition the lights. So turn the scene using your ball prop.

So there is definitely a lot of good things about using a ball or box prop as a master control thingie. :O)