I hate to keep comparing Blender with the way things work in other apps, but when it comes to these modifiers, it seems to make so much more sense to have Twist and Bend as their own seperate modifiers, with the ability to define an axis for each.  As it is now, it seems Bend works as expected only along the X axis, unless you use another object or reference in the scene as a origin offset.  Then the Twist option has to be done another way, because stacking the Simple Deform modifier gives very unpredictable results.  Seriously, this modifier should be much more intuitive, because these are deformations which are considered very common.  I should be able to just add a Twist deformation, then a Bend, along whichever axis I want.  I don't get the complexity here.

I hope I'm missing something really "simple".

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.