Alex, good to hear you like it.
Do you mind opening jira for designer and non interrupting start events? That way we could include that in 6.0
When it comes to repository creation it's still there, you just need to add user to group ADMIN (case sensitive) and then you'll get menu option to create repositories. Additionally there is a small command line tool called kie-config-cli that allows some administration tasks as well. It's part of kie-wb-distributions.
HTH