Perhaps there's an easy way to work around this, such as pressing a certain key combination to reposition the cursor after the paste.

True enough. Most good editors should allow me to write a macro to do this; I suppose I'm not thinking creatively enough. There's no reason to expect column pasting to work the way it does in Brief; in fact as I think about it it's kind of counterintuitive. It just works so darn well!

this option is called "Allow cursor positioning beyond line end". Works like a charm.

Excellent, I thought maybe I was just missing this. I can't believe how hooked I got on this feature.

And now I think I might be able to give up on smart tabs now that I have virtual space. I found the reason I mostly wanted smart tabs is because I kept having to tab back over into my code blocks after creating them (I have this ugly habit of coding my end braces as soon as I put my begin braces and then going back and putting in code in between). With virtual space I can simply push the “up” arrow and I’ll still be in my code block.