I have another suggestion:

3. I think it would be useful to have a command that duplicates the effect of using ctrl+tab. There could be switches to shift to the next window of various types, and switches to allow left or right shifting, and a number to be specify how many windows to shift.

/shift [-lrscq(etc)] [num]

-l = left, -r = right (default)
-s = status windows
-c = channel windows
-q = query windows
(etc) = various switches for dcc/fserv/etc

num = number of windows to shift to the left/right

-genius_at_work