(I actually don't use fish full time, been experimenting once in a while)

I believe Alt+. (or any kind of history substitution) hasn't been implemented by design. I don't have references handy but they should be easy to find.

Incremental history search is just type something and then up arrow.

The rest of your questions I don't know the answers but it wouldn't surprise me if there were none. Fish prefers to have a simple and coherent syntax to a concise one (though I agree the text substitution is annoying – it seems they usually put the subshell result in a variable and expand that in the string).

This helps understanding their design goals http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/design.html