I've noticed some of the same things, and sorry to say I don't have an answer for you... but I do have some more questions to add to your list:
Is there an easy way to get the size of the header graphics to a more reasonable size? If you drop an image into a blog entry for example it ends up as a 500k PNG! What the heck is that? Even the large photo gallery pictures aren't that big! I suppose that I could duplicate the picture in iPhoto, shrink it and whatnot by hand there, then drop that one into iWeb, but that seems like an aweful pain for something that is supposed to be SIMPLE... anyone know where the options for what format and compression level various pictures get saved as are?
Someone else mentioned the lack of a way to make a photo page with sub pages for albums... this makes perfect sense but you can't seem to do it! They posted some sort of tricky work around, but I was wondering if anyone else had come up with anything simple? My thought, which I will try when I get home, would be to make a "second site" that you just manually link to from the main site and then add photo pages as you need them.
Lastly, anyone figure out a clever AppleScript or Automator way to sync up your "published to folder" page to an ftp server? How about at least tell me where the option to make it shut the heck up about configuring my .Mac account everytime it loads, or reminding me to publish to my non-existant .Mac account everytime I quit?
I really like iWeb, aside from a few small issues mentioned above, except that I can't shake the feeling the whole thing is just an advertisement for .Mac! Don't sell me an $80 product and then litter it with limitations and ads so I will buy your overpriced web hosting service! If that's how they wanted it they should have just made iWeb part of the .Mac package and left it out of iLife!
