Elisa,
I think your issue is not the same as Ioannis's, his features were inserted to a layer, that means in his layer there are many features with different types such as point type, line type and area type. According to your description, you talked about the "point layer", so your layer just has the point features, not includes any other features with line type or area type. For the layer drawing order, there are not any rules, we draw the layers according to the layer's inserting order. So Ioannis talked about the issue for order of drawing features in a layer, you talked about order of drawing layers on map.
For your second question, we have added that to our enhancement tracker, you can view it from the link below:
helpdesk.thinkgeo.com/EnhancementTracker
Your suggestion is really useful for us,
Thanks,
Scott,