From looking at the interface just now, the things you can control using these parameter knobs are (in the most recent incarnation of the software)...
Pitch, decay, attack, freq shift, shift range and shift rate.
There's also cutoff, resonance, aux 1 & 2, panning and volume, together with the ability to alter settings in the FX chain (peak and shelf cutoff & gain, and bandwidth in one case).
So you have only the note shift presently (in semitones (hmm, just thinking it'd be fun to have quarter tones or even the ability to auto-harmonise...)).
The divide and move buttons effectively let you grab a section of a sequence and play it looped, so you do get a repeat function - it would be quite cool to somehow record that action to an instrument parameter knob (or to the XY pad).
The pads are all velocity and pressure sensitive, so you can use pressure on a pad to record beats at different velocities by using the roller function and the pad pressure sensitivity at the same time.
Not sure about query 2, I've had a lot of problems with the controller connection to my system so I'm months behind the curve on figuring SparkLE out. Hopefully someone more au fait can give you pointers on that. Of course there's always Youtube for tutotials, walkthroughs and demos - some of that is good for ideas.
