Experiences while using SharePoint Web Services

I have been using the SharePoint built in web services to access the rows and columns of a SharePoint list. However, I had made a critical assumption that turned out to be wrong. The assumption was that when a list is accessed through the web service layer, the attributes collection would have an attribute for every column in the list. This turned out to be incorrect as only non-null columns appear to be returned.

I had also assumed that the column name would be the name of the attribute but soon found that it is the internal name which makes sense as XML attribute names cannot contain spaces.

Thoughts on the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.2

I've been using the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services for a while now and I have a few issues with it.

1. How can you simply create a WSP without doing a deploy of the code to a WSS server instance.
2. Should the content of the pkg folder be source controlled - I got into a few troubles when I tried to keep it source controlled but something tells me I just need to do things a bit differently.
3. How does the WSP View work on the back end?