In reference to the discussion going on in this other thread and the points that syphus is trying to get across, I thought it might be better to continue things in a new thread here, and to hopefully get those points across in a more concise and immediately understandable way, via the magic of screen shots! 
Currently, it is possible to make selections in the pattern editor which look like this:
It would be incredibly super-awesome-tastic if we could also make more granular selections like this:
I can already imagine some of you reaching for the reply button to mention advanced edit, so I’ll just stop you there. Yes, both myself and syphus obviously realise that anything you might want to do with the instrument number, or volume column, or panning column, or delay column, etc., can already be achieved with the advanced edit functions. Let me just say that I think advanced edit is awesome, and I personally use it every single time I work with Renoise, but it’s totally beside the point here: the simple act of selecting data in the pattern editor is not an advanced function.
No matter how each person likes to work, whether they prefer to use keyboard or mouse, whether they prefer to use advanced edit or not, etc., it’s irrelevant. This is a basic usability issue with the pattern editor itself. We can currently manually edit each component part of a note (note, instrument number, volume, panning, delay) and each component part of an pattern command (effect number, effect value), but even though each of those component values is clearly represented by its own distinct column in the pattern editor, we cannot actually select that data directly. We can only make a more broad selection of the entire note, or the entire pattern command, and unfortunately this can feel very illogical and unintuitive when you find yourself needing to edit those values on a regular basis.
If we look at this problem objectively, rather than trying to impose certain ways of working onto each other, can we just agree that the pattern editor is obviously one of the most powerful and important parts of Renoise itself, and that improving the selection functionality would only be a good thing?
