Hi Bill,
The Simple Deform Modifier is indeed not simple (but the deformations it makes are simple).
Use what you like, but the Simple Deform Modifier is great for making something circular (like a tire, for instance), because you can set the Bend to 360°. (I’d like to see you do that with Proportional Editing😉). The most commonly used alternative for that, is a Curve Modifier, but that always gets a bit messy, with a hole or overlap, that needs to be fixed.
…and I have no idea, what is meant by X-Axis is tangent to Y-Axis, sounds plain wrong, but maybe I am just missing the context (timestamp?)
