Text align right equals left and left equals right. Living in the Upside Down?

Any idea what's going on here?

It's a little broken, but the principle is that left alignment is from the center point, left margin starting at the center point, and right margin aligns to the center. (Right margin aligns to the center of the screen, while left margin is slightly to the right of center, to the control button, which has been offset for some reason since about 10.6.)

Thanks. It seems, to me,  quite counterintuitive. 

I'm a bit lost when editing and trying to move text around in relation to other text because, for instance, I now have three sets of position information; the plugin, the text and the layer. 

Is there a best practice for moving this around? I thought I had it nailed and even mapped out a grid of places to put the text on the screen (A1, B2 etc) but then discovered it was cropping because I'd uses the wrong positioning value. I still really have no idea how text knows how large it is and why it crops in some places. Mystery. 

I would argue that text is not broken... it's just a different type of object (no pun intended.)

A text object has a Position point (X, Y, Z). There is an onscreen control if you look. When the text is Left-aligned,
the OSC is just to the bottom left (baseline-start of character) of the first character in the text "block". If you
change the alignment to Center, that position point does not change, but the text "aligns" its width's center to
that position -- still on the baseline. Changing to Right will align the right side of the text to that position point...
see where this is going??

Here's a little trick:

Draw a small circle or square - doesn't matter - turn off the visibility.
Add a Behaviors > Basic > Align To to the text object and drag the Circle into the Object drop well.
Now, changing the alignment will not change the text for a single line.
If you have a multiline text, then the longest line will not move, but shorter lines will align to the edges as
expected.

Position the text by setting the position of the shape object it is aligned to.

Sorry about the "little trick" - that needs to be done in Motion - and then publish the template to final cut pro.