Adobe Illustrator two step numeric scale is broken

One of my favourite Ai tricks is what I call 'two step numberic scale'.
Is use it to match typography to the size of other objects.
Typography has some characteristics that makes the bounding box not usable: rounded characters are optically aligned to the baseline, x-height and cap height.
I had this trick to first scale vertical, by snapping vertices, and then copy the resulted vertical scale to horizontal. But for some reason Ai 2017 does not support this. When accessing the values in the scale dialog, all scale values are overwritten with some unimportant value.
Please repair this!