The docs should be collected in the
wiki; when there is enough there, (parts of) it will be included in the distribution. Customisation of player colour has been added upstream to SVN, so expect to see that in the next release. There may be other ways added in the future, but a lot of that requires we have artists who are ready and willing to create models for it.
Deflecting shots is an interesting idea, I will sit on the idea for a while and see if I can come up with a good way to implement it. The only problem I foresee is the sword collision is done along a two dimensional line, so there's not really any depth to collide with from the other direction; I'm sure I can think of something though.