I admit I am guilty of that, although I ran it via several iterations to make sure it covers everything I needed and created a nice style that i liked. It just saves me so much time.
1) Here the real problem is the maintainer of the syntax file who is hard to reach. I have contacted him several times but never got fa reply. No real problem of Vim.
2) merged February 25th. Not bad I would say (again a runtime file problem)
3) merged with 7.4.646
4) yes, sometimes it takes a while.
5) took long but has been merged with 7.4.652