GIMP :: Scaling And Rotating Images

While Gimp is great, one of its biggest downfalls is the way in which it handles resizing and rotating images.

- Open a new image.
- Draw / manipulate / play with your image.
- Add layers, colors and images included.

Now, let's say you want to trace an image that's at the bottom of your layer stack. But that image is the wrong size, so you select the area you want to trace, drop its transparency down to 10%, and attempt to scale it to the size you've been sketching on the layer above it. The moment you attempt to scale / rotate it, it shoots back to 100% transparency, which is unintuitive because you can no longer see what's beneath the layer. In Photoshop, an area that is being scaled / rotated stays at the transparency you gave it.

Is there a way to make this NOT happen?