I disagree on point 3: Sometimes I want to select all items EXCEPT a certain few. It's faster to select all and then deselect some, instead of selecting almost everything one at a time.

While I agree on points 1 and 2 regarding the fact that "(more)" prompts are unnecessary, I do think that these sorts of events should be made more prominent.

How about three levels of alert? The first level is the simple "output a message to the message bar", which is easily read back once the recent messages function is reinstated.

The third level is the one that is activating now - a "(more)" message.

The second level, between these two, might do things like put a message in a different location, where the player is less likely to miss it, and leave it there for a few turns.

And with three different levels, there could be user options to change the level of each type of alert - as I see it, the alerts are: low HP, rotting of food items, loss/destruction of inventory, stat changes, special events (like the manifestation of the papyrus scroll in ADoM), and statuses. As default, I'd put special events as the only third-level alert, with stat changes and low HP as first-level and the others as second-level.

Actually, a fourth level could be added, for a popup alert (that is, in a separate window), but would be disabled by default.

Why do I not want rotting food as "low priority"? Because if you're moving around in a dungeon, and move to "hungry", and failed to notice the corpse you'd been planning to eat had rotted away, you may find yourself with no food in a problem situation. At least you have an opportunity to look for more food prior to any impact on stats/speed if you're alerted properly to the fact that your corpse is gone.