I have been using Alpine/Pine for almost 13 years, and agree with most of your concerns. However, some of these can be controlled using the settings.

- Full name search in LDAP work correctly. Have you set name, surname, and given name attributes correctly in your LDAP setup.

- I exclusively used IMAP and have had no troubles with IMAP folder being fist in the list.

- Starting in the inbox (using key sequences) has always worked for me.

- Reply all does not include me in the Cc. Have you tried setting up alternate addresses field in the settings.

For HTML emails, I have set w3m as my html viewer. w3m works better with complex layouts in html.