Unfortunately we're often limited by whatever blobs the manufacturer provides and whatever is supported by the mainline kernel, as you can imagine there's not a whole lot of people experimenting with the latest and the greatest on these devices so the project often runs into regressions when upgrading. I wish the situation was better but given the prices these devices are going for it's a small wonder they work as well as they do ;) Having (some) mainline support does mean that we'll see updates for years and years so with a bit of luck the situation will improve over time!
For reference the Rockchip devices (RK3266 and RK3566) have been supported for longer and offer a general smooth experience. I've had pretty good luck with my Powkiddy X55!
With regards to 2, just like bazzite and some other distros Rocknix uses a read-only filesystem, you can use mounts to allow certain paths to be overwritten. The default configuration strives to find a balance between allowing some customization and stability.
What you're describing does sound like a bug, it might be that some flag is set incorrectly. I would recommend dropping in at the Discord.