Hi Owen,
We have a new feature that was recently introduced to help with 3D navigation. I would suggest playing around with "drag frames"
In the editor if you set a button to "middle mouse drag" you can add a modifier to it and have it be "alt plus middle mouse drag" and other variations. This seems to be the best solution at the moment and works well for me. We are working on a better solution still, but aren't there yet. =)
Hope this helps.
Julian, as always, Thank you for your great contributions! Excellent work my friend.