Hi Charles,
One clarification is that you don't have to create volume regions - you can just create field datum points as references for the mapped mesh regions.
On issue 2, the visualization lines you see while editing the region do not necessarily exactly predict the shape and location of the eventual elements. The latter will tend to be more smoothly distributed.
Issues 3 and 4 are bugs - could you please file a case with TS ? We'll also see if issue 2 can be improved when 3 is fixed.
Thanks,
Steve.