Cool.
Those shortfall are the kind of issues we look for in the forum and do our best to incorporate where there’s a demand for them – so if you’d like to raise a thread for that I’ll be more than happy to look in to and see what can be done.
The reason the slider is only set for the home/front page is because not many users want the distraction on single post view or internal pages. Again options can be added to accommodate this
The theme does come with a page-home.php which is a custom home page template for other content than the blog feed. When writing a page have a look in the Template drop down and should see the two included templates.
The theme has been fully tested with 3.8 and was pre-tested with the nightly builds prior to 3.8 release and was found to be fully compatible. Again if you find any issues please report them in the forum and we’ll do our best to resolve them.