I have been a Revit user since 2007, and this has always been like this.
You place a model element in your model randomly. Then you want to adjust its location and highlight the element, and Revit picks the most random, and mostly the longest distance available in your active view to place dimension witness lines. sometimes these witness lines are to gridlines, sometimes they're to walls, sometimes they're to other model elements. There's no rhyme or reason to how it picks, and almost always, you have grid lines right next to the element you've placed.
A perfect example is as below. I place a column and it again goes and picks distances to gridlines farthest to it in my visible view. Boggles the mind.
Can we please have at the very least the option to let Revit know we only want how it should place witness lines?
