You are right, vertex coloring in modeler will annoy most people, instead some vertex painting tool in editor would be the must.
ha! this is a feature that has been planned as well as painting detail layers on a material based on a blend weight image.
I played with the wind parameter and i noticed one issues :
Using sliders we can't manually enter values to make subtle wind effects, for example it's not possible to enter smaller values than 100 like 30,10 or 5 for example.
The wind is strange, whatever i use values like 50 or 10000 for the two sliders , the effect becomes strong over time and decreases before becoming strong again.
The sliders are not yet used and should be disabled until they are used.
As for strength, this is because skyline has a basic wind strength/gust variations over time instead of a constant wind strength to make it look more natural. This has not been exposed to the end user yet.
There is "Rim lighting" option in the same panel, will it be back for Gen 2 ? It could be cool for some effects or game graphics.
Yes, this will be added back into gen2 at some point, but you can get a similar effect in specular workflow by setting fresnel to the bottom of the slider and reducing roughness, then change the specular colour to something else