Back in 2010, a Youtuber named Derek Lieu created a supercut called "Every Anime Opening Ever Made" [0]. One of the notes:
> Interesting thing I learned, if a character is running it's overwhelmingly to the left of the screen.
(Watching the video, "running" may as well also include "standing" and "flying")
Characters moving is a bit different than a diorama, but there may be something to it. I think I remember something similar someone else had found about western animation, that it's biased towards having characters move to the right rather than the left.
I'd follow the reading-direction paradigm for something like a UI or arranging books on a shelf, but not for art.
So how would this work in Ancient Greece where they wrote boustrophedon (alternately left to right and right to left)?
And how does it work for illiterate people or peoples without a written language?
I think one of these may have been meant to say left!
Maybe putting his airplanes facing left made your veteran's models pop because they were inconsistent with other models.
Anyway, if you want to make people read the options on buttons, randomize the order each time the popup appears but always destructive buttons like "delete" red colours.
Whilst I initially thought it was cool, it quickly wore me out. Often times, if I was in the 'flow' of editing, that tiny fraction of time that it took me to stop and have to actually read the screen (instead of habitually clicking on a position without even reading) was enough to interrupt my thought processes and impact my productivity.
I think it would be like randomly rearranging the clutch/brake/throttle pedals on a manual car every day. Sometimes you just want your tools to stay out of the way and not interrupt you when you are busy. It is far better to have your feet (oh, ok - mouse cursor) fall to the right places without having to think too much, especially if your mind is busy on more important stuff happening.
His reasoning was that most people's eyes move left to right when examining something - which mimics their eye movement when reading text (at least in Western societies. In R-L countries I guess the opposite would be true).
He said that by position the nose/cockpit of the aircraft on the left side, people's eyes would always go to where the 'little humans' would sit first, then move away towards the right. Similarly if you had scale model humans in a diorama setting - place them on the left hand side.
Placing the vehicles going against their eye movement would also make their attention 'catch' and stop at details of the object 'moving' in the opposite way (something about how people who drive cars are just more instinctually aware of something that is moving against their direction of travel). Whereas if they had to scan in the same direction the vehicle was moving, their attention would just slip past interesting points.
I've used those lessons in most of my UX design nowadays. Placing buttons and important items towards the right of a page, with lesser items further right. The only exception is if it is a destructive action call (deleting a record etc.), then I usually place the button all the way to the right so it isn't in visual way and too tempting.