Regarding the URL handling, I also used to hate it, but wrote a tool to make it easier to deal with; details are here if you're interested (despite the title, the relevant tool is not Vim-only): <http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing-restructure...;
The bit I hate is that I have no desire to have a global list of URLs and manage them. So instead I have to put a double underscore suffix after every url otherwise you get bizarre error messages. eg `foo <foo.com>`__