Your comments

This issue should be gone now that 0.17 is out!
(Everything you listed is already possible, apart from controlled non-code based animation and randomness, so I'm a bit confused)
I'm not sure what you're asking - do you want to know how to do the things you listed in Shader Forge?
It's the node previews updating as you drag the slider! I've planned to add a way of telling it to only update the nodes when releasing, instead of per-frame :)
I should make a script that goes through Unity's built-in includes and extract all reserved names!
This is an issue, and it's particularly annoying with SpecColor! (I've run into it a lot as well)
This has now been fixed in Beta 0.18! Thanks for the report :)
I have given this some thought before I started working on SF, and it is something I would like to do. However, it will most likely be in the form of a custom code node, where you can insert whichever code you like :) (At your own risk)