I actually mentioned the 8 minutes in my post above :) I agree, I don't like that either, but they are figuring out ways to avoid that spammers or bots can abuse the system, so they need to put a few "stops" in. It's not ideal and I'm sure they'll come up with other ways in the future.
They are still in beta. Re the editor - I have no knowledge of this, but again, they're in beta and lots of things are still being developed.