The pretransform ability is most commonly used to reorient imported assets to a more natural alignment. Currently, the pretransform is applied to children, which breaks the intuitive promise.
For example, say you import a monkey head that faces up (into the positive y axis), and you use a pretransform to make it point forwards (into the positive z axis). If you were to create a child object at some position in the positive z axis, you'd expect the monkey to face it, but in fact the child is effected by the pretransform, and appears somewhere unexpected (below the monkey's head in this example).
This example is attached.