I completely agree with your posts, except that I don't consider 'plan and go' a good system. The demo was pure hell to play. And the controls were just crap.

During the tutorial I noticed that in order to use a key to unlock a door, you had to put it in one of your merc's slots - in JA2 mercs just use the right key on their own, don't they? This could potentially give you a headache if your merc collected 10+ identical keys. I guess you'd have to try them one by one...