Don't warm up. Matteo, rightly, invited you not to leave the subject... and I have to say that I lost talking about elastic return, but especially warp... even if I may have understood... I remember studying the pre-compressed beams, that is, curved before laying in operation in an opposite way to the natural landing that they would have suffered, so that the form remained "flat", but above all the forces, partially, compensated.
instead of the manipulation of imported geometries:
I find interesting the discussion. in fact spaceclaim in my way of seeing is not strong with the surfaces, works very well with the solids instead. I don't know well the "face touch" section (a sow button that once clicked shows a whole new menu full of functions dedicated to the manipulation of the faces... but it is not my sector).
I tried to make my contribution, I hope liked, showing you 3 different methodologies to solve problems like those I saw in your images:
1) face touch (I don't know the functions well so I did my best). I used "offset" between the two faces so as to block the thickness (key point that emerged from the discussion). I first deformed and then "replaced". the figure is simple though... when there are so many points in my way to see it is necessary to simplify the geometry with the appropriate functions or recalculating it with the 3d sketch tools (as shows the video posted by matteo for the import stl, format that I often use to import hoppers, cones disassati and other figures made by the other specific cad).
2)manipulation with the "setting" tool... well you can move the individual points without losing the connectivity of the model, lines, faces or a combination of different elements, not only in the 3 directions. of course you can also rotate.
3)what I think has returned the best result is the reduction of geometry to a surface, the automatic rotation of the external faces compared to the central one and the "extension" of the surface with the initial thickness... Inspection works really well even with much more complex figures (even with different thicknesses).
the example of course is related to what we talked about here, the best solution is different depending on the geometry to "repair".