Hi Michael,
You certainly know how to dig deeper into the Design Studio SDK framework. 
Thanks for the very informative feedback regarding the available options.
On a side note, this raises another question that's been on my mind. As you've indicated, the standard SDK components are rendered inside a DIV wrapper, so that the component can be placed on a specific part of the canvas surface. However, what if we wanted to force the component to take up the entire browser area? I believe we have access to the complete DOM from within an SDK component, so in theory, instead of rendering the component inside the auto-created DIV using this$(), presumably we could just render it in the root container of the browser. What do you think?
Regards,
Mustafa.