the drawing tool example on the openscales homepage is working just fine for me, maybe your just not seeing it?
go to
http://openscales.org/demo/current/ , and click "Feature Handling" on the Left side... then click the "draw and edit features" button .....then in the layers box you can click the little arrows icon next to a layer to see the tools. You click on a tool option to activate it, then click on the map.
also adding a drawing layer like so:
<DrawingsLayer id="DrawingsLayer" identifier="drawing layer 1"/>
is only adding a layer that can be drawn on, it wont show anything differently if you just looking at the map.
make sure you add the layerManager component to the map also, so you can see the layer and use the drawing tools.
add the layerManager like so:
<LayerManager y="10" left="10"/>
-Will