Ted,
My solution to your problem is to add a straight section of track to the ends of every joint that I want to align. Besides being and alignment aid as you describe, they also prevent the auto jump to connect that can happen. Its not to hard to connect horizontally or vertically, but to connect diagonal sections involves both movements.
Jan
PS. Another thought would be for the track section to auto-align along the vectors you propose and then one could snip track to fill the gaps. Is the an out-fill function somewhere?