Very large Object transformation, hard to do fine adjustments with transform Gizmo

Here are a couple of Workflow issues I have encountered with the UI. If anyone knows of good workarounds or key-combs, please tell.

I have transforms being used to group a column and a capital. I am scaling the column to make it very very tall. Then I need to transform that group, to make it abut the item it is proping up.

Problems
* When zoomed in on the top of the column/capital, to see clearly the position of it, to the item it supports, I cant see the transform gizmo. Its waaay below my view, as the object is so tall. It would be great if some kind of key combo could pop it into view

* Because I cant use the gizmo, I instead use the virtual slider on the Y axis of the transform type in. Problem is, moving the mouse left and right makes a relatively big change to the spinner value. It would be great if a key, like SHIFT could be used to make it apply smaller changes, and say CTRL to make much larger ones. Think 3dsmax uses something like this...