Rgearding diagonal movement: Our tests with many gamers show that your proposed solutions do not really work for the majority of people:
(a) external keyboards are almost "not there".
(b) These keymappings just don't work for most people. Most people really don't even think of using anything but either WASD or cursor keys (depending on their upbringing and previous gaming experience).
(c) ruins WASDEF which is a far more commonly accepted keybinding practice than the weird movement practices ruling the roguelike community since VI days (one of the lousiest UI/UX examples ever available).
We really want to reach outside of the hardcore roguelike community (because it's much too tiny to sustain the development effort required for a game like Ultimate ADOM for a prolonged amount of time) and thus we always need to ask: "What works for a much wider and much more casual community (compared to roguelike fans - you gals and guys are truly hardcore).
Side remark: Actually diagonal movement can be activated with a trivial flag in AGE (our underlying game engine) and we probably at some point will also provide a game experience with that - but for now our focus is that aforementioned "reaching out to a wider audience" and we strongly believe (at least currently) that for being successful in doing so we are better off in not having diagonal movement.
Regarding auto-explore: Please try the latest alpha. Auto-exploration has been completely rewritten and although their are still a few minor kinks and special cases wearw working on it now should be much better and faster.