General questions about language tools

[DrQuincy]

I finally got round to try the language tools and they are great, as expected. I have a few basic questions please. Sorry there are a few here but I thought it better to do it in one thread. I have searched for the answers but couldn't find anything.

1. How do you access a language-alternative field if the language has a dash in it? E.g. you can have language foo-bar but not $page->body_foo-bar; the field is not allowed (tried it without the dash and with an underscore when using the API to no avail)
2. Is it possible to have the languages expanded by default? I.e. as though you have clicked the folder icon
3. Is it possible to show the languages in a dropdown instead of tab for large numbers of languages? Just curious really. It's not often this would be used but I do have one site with 15+ languages that I may eventually port over.
4. In Languages what are Live Search, Site Translation Files and Core Translation Files for? Is this irrelevant to the front end? It looks like it is for translating PHP files but just wanted to make sure it wasn't something I could make use of. I will only ever require English back-end and would store or translations in fields in the database.
5. If you choose a non-default language in your profile in the back-end is there any way to know from the site tree that for a given page the name is not active? It doesn't appear so but I feel this is quite an important feature if managing lots of pages and languages.
6. What is the rationale behind always searching the current language and the default language when using the API? There is a workaround here but just wondered as I wouldn't thought it better to only search the current language.
7. Finally, let's say you have a latest news section on a site with five languages and you only wish to publish an article in one or two of those languages. Is that possible? From what I can gather so long as you are publishing in the default language you can simply uncheck the “Active” box for the languages you don't wish to have a page for. However, it looks like you must have the default one. I presume this is so it has all the fallbacks it needs. I guess it would be easy enough to throw a 404 for the default page.

Thanks!