"Create new heading after this one" command

[Nuutti Kotivuori <naked@iki.fi>]

Hi,

Very often I end up in a situation where I'm at a heading, and need to
create a new heading after this one, with the same level. But this
seems to be overly difficult in some cases.

I am pointing out a few problems with an example layout of this:

  * Heading
  ** Item 1...
  ** Ite[1]m 2
     - Text
     - Other[2] text
     - More text
  *** Subitem 1
  *** Subitem 2
  ** Item 3[3]...
  * Another heading

(I'm using [x] to mark possible positions for the point, which I
outline below.)

In the [1] case, the point is currently in the middle of the "Item 2"
heading. To get what I want, I need to do C-a to get to the beginning
of the line, then M-RET to get a new bullet item which appears
*before* "Item 2" and then press M-down to make it be after "Item 2"
and before "Item 3". I could, alternatively, move to the beginning of
the "Item 3" line and press M-RET, but for me that's counter intuitive
- and it wouldn't work if I wanted an item below "Item 3".

And if I do the thing that would be intuitive for me - that is, moving
to the end of "Item 2" with C-e and pressing M-RET, I get a new item
after "Item 2", but the notes I had with "Item 2" Become notes for the
*new* item - which is not what I want.

In the [2] case, things are even more difficult. Pressing M-RET
creates new list items, so I first need to navigate myself out to
somewhere where there's a heading and then do the same thing as
before.

In the [3] case, behaviour is actually really broken. If the item is
folded, pressing C-e will bring me just before the "..." signifying
the folded status. If I press M-RET there, the point just mysteriously
gets moved to the end of the line (after "..."). If I start typing
there and go around changing folding a number of different things can
happen - worst of which is losing the entire subtree under "Item 3"! 
(This can be reproduced by: M-RET "foobar" C-a TAB)

For this, all, I have two alternative suggestions:

Either: Make C-e M-RET consistently make a new heading below the
current one - regardless of folding and leaving any text associated
with the current heading alone. But this may be difficult, considering
that folding seems to be a bit troublesome at times.

Or, simply: Add a new command which creates a new heading after the
current one, regardless where the point is on the line, at the same
level the current heading is. This command could work also in the text
part of headings, like lists - always creating headings, unlike
M-RET. Prefix argument on this command could create the heading before
the current one, though I'm not sure if it would be terribly useful. A
variation, creating a subheading (one level deeper) of the current
item could be useful, but since that can be achieved with the former
by just pressing M-right after the command, I don't think this one is
too useful either.

I've run into this problem ever since I started using org-mode - so I
thought others might have the same problem. If not, I can hack this
trivially for myself only.

Thank you for your time,
-- Naked