Absolutely :) I will make a checkbox to enable/disable auto-compile

You can still make parameters like that with exposed values. Currently, Cubemap, Texture2D and Slider are the only Properties you can expose, but for example, you can have a slider that alters UVs for, like you said, a detail normal, which is done by multiplying the UVs with the slider :)

That said, I could have a checkbox to enable/disable the builtin scale+offset, and use a custom material inspector that hides the offset values for properties without it

Great idea! I presume you mean blend modes as in photoshop?

Multiply/Screen/Overlay/Hard light etc?

My general reasoning is that the most accessible button (LMB in this case) should probably be assigned to the most common action. I believe panning the camera is more common than node selection. Anyhow, this is perhaps something that the user should be able to specify themselves in some config :)

Parameter names in general are planned! This seems like something people want as soon as possible, I'll prioritize this for the next version :)

There needs to be an intuitive way in which these work. Internally, these offsets create additional variables you might not want to have. It's also per-texture, which is not always what you want. For example, if you have a material that has three textures, a diffuse, a specular and a normal map. Say you wanted to change the tiling of the whole material. In this case, you would have to adjust all of the separately, for something that should only require one parameter for all three. I need to think about this a bit :)

Fixed in 0.04