Commander G:
I agree with numbers 1, 2 & 5
As for number 3, I know the game allows setting an option to create log text files for players and for the game; I don't recall what detail is in the logs, but that may be a starting place for fixing your complaint.
As for number 4, I think there are settings to notify you of idle queues; idle ships are generally found by cycling through the next ship/next fleet buttons. And you can always find idle queues by looking at the "Construction Queues" window. Besides, if I got a message every turn for each idle queue, I could get anywhere from 10-90 Messages each turn (that's right - I don't build something at EVERY colony on EVERY turn; I know most of you build constantly, but I can't produce enough resources to sustain that building schedule
). And that's just in the middle game; in the late game, this could turn into hundreds of Messages each turn...