I might be misunderstanding you or I may not have explained myself clearly …
I'm talking about typing directly into Alfred's prompt, not pulling in text from a selection in the OS. I do need to explore the latter, but first I'd like to solve the former. I didn't realize how much I used that in QS until it was gone.
One other feature I'm missing that's directly related to text manipulation: Line breaks! It was a little cumbersome, but hitting <opt> + <return> would insert a line break into the QS input, which allowed me to queue up a multiline body of text to operate on. I used this frequently for quick notes in a meeting, coming back to it later to drop somewhere else (eg Jira, nvAlt, a slide deck, or email).