After further investigation, I found out that everything listed under the caveats list is lost forever, except maybe for manual ISO control. Manual ISO control would be hindered a lot though (it'd be pretty much useless in its current state), so I removed it entirely.
That being said, the HAL itself is pretty much the best I can make it as of the Feb. 16 build (there are lot of tweaks I made to it that aren't listed in the OP). There isn't much more I can do to make it better at this point, aside from bug fixes for random bugs that may pop up from time to time.
