The candles, skulls, and whatnot make for some fantastic ambiance but the detection logic for them means you're still basically forced into the vanilla "ball pit" design. I can't do something like have a tall wall of shelves directly behind it with nooks for candles or skulls, or candles on the floor around the table, or 3 block high shelves with skulls on top.

If detection were more flexible we could make much more immersive designs for our enchanting setups.

The "balance" of the system partially comes from the fact that you can only have so many stat-providing blocks, limited by the number of blockspaces that the table checks. Expanding it to simply check a huge area around it would invalidate that.

It could be possible to scan a wider area and limit it to the first 32 blocks found, which would accomplish the same goal, but I think it would be confusing to people expecting it to only scan the rings.

I definitely don't mean to suggest allowing more blocks to be used, just that the physical layout be more flexible so the ideal design doesn't always wind up being a McDonalds ball pit with candles around it.

Maybe one way to keep it relatively intuitive would be to make the determination based on contact. If nothing's physically touching the enchanting table it follows the classic rules. If a recognized block is physically adjacent then it will instead follow that block out and then up.