I noticed your main editor is emacs? I consider myself a Terminal Native as well, but why dont you like using GUI Emacs and Eshell/m-x Shell instead?
GUI emacs does brings nice features: -multiple fonts / font sizes at the same time (nice for minimap http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap !) -more shortcut possibilities with s- added to the usual C- and M-- -more colours
Shell/ansi-term modes don't work well enough. There's always problems with shortcuts/encoding/escape sequences/Ncurse.
You might want/need to install more themes, you can do that with the package manager (M-x package-list-packages)
If you want your ~/.profile to be sourced, a quick fix is to open the GUI app from the command line. Apps launched by finder don't source your profile.
And this goes to the point of why emacs users like myself use iTerm. Because it works. The only thing I had to setup in iTerm was my color scheme. And even that wasn't required! (iTerm is launched by finder and finds my profile just fine.)