Yes, it's a screw-up on our part that it's so easy to mess up text by un-ticking that aspect-lock control. We would have been better to remove the feature (the aspect lock / unlock button) and so we are indeed very seriously considering removing the feature in future releases.

And while you could argue that producing squashed text for use in graphics is valid, and it will work and be WYSIWYG, you can equally argue that all squashed text is ugly (it is) it's not something a professional designer would do, and so this is in fact not a useful operation.

We always have to balance whether providing a given feature makes the product more complex and more likely to give poor / ugly results. In this case it gives bad results, and also gives us a real support headache (as you can tell from the length of this thread). When customers cannot work out why things have gone wrong, that is a sign of poor software design on our (my) part.