Or is that particularly difficult?

It's not a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of how long it would take to implement it.  I have no doubt that the devs know how to implement it, but they probably have a list of higher-priority issues they'd rather devote the 2 hours of time to.  

I'd also like to see:

- Mouseover of armies on the left column HUD (Empire Tree) displays remaining moves (moves left), not maximum moves

- hotkey for cycling through units with movement remaining (also seems to be a standard in TBS titles)

- hotkey for cycling through champions

- ctrl-# to assign a hotkey to an army or a city, and # centers on that army or city (also pretty standard in strategy titles)

- renaming cities

- configuring hotkeys

I hope all of this isn't asking too much?

Just tested, it does. Sorry, I was using "start" and "end" keys, as I did not even know that Tab does that. I didn't see this listed anywhere (including the manual).

With regard to the camera angle, I too change it frequently to avoid the problem of hills messing up mouse pointing.  The numeric 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys (above the alphabet part of the keyboard) switch to different standard camera angles, perhaps there's one of those that you'll like better.  As far as I know there's no way to lock the camera angle where you left it, that's an interesting idea.

Also could be a number over the research bar indicating how many turns left till it completes instead of having to open up the research to see this information?

i don't see this option

If it isn't showing up on your city bar at the bottom left of the screen, click the little arrows to the right of the bar for more options.