Well snapping uses the selected vertices, but the target can be anything, even on the other side of the mesh. Limit selection to visible will limit your original selection to the visible vertices, but the target part of the snapping has nothing to do with selections. Only the developers can tell you if something is a bug…
With the shape key to be modified active and the target vertices selected in Edit Mode, execute Blend From Shape. Uncheck Add in the operator dialog and leave the source as "Basis" and Blend weight as "1.000".
Hehe - wait until you realize that even morph target data survives model editing ! Chopping off half of a face with morphtargets and re-attaching to another character ? No problemo, Blenderino can do.
Does blender's sculpting have anything like zbrush's morph target brush, where you can avoid a destructive workflow and just erase certain parts back to the basemesh? I'm using multires modifier.
About cages, why cant you : duplicate mesh take duplicated mesh turn it into a cage mesh, set it to render target done the duplicated mesh will have the same uvcoords because you were a smarty and unwrapped the original model before all of this.
Consoles are the main target platform for games, and games are ported to both 360 and ps3, so it's not about directX. It's about you(and most everyone else) being on windows and developers targeting that platform even if they could port their games to every other platform. Blender game engine (and I'm a fan of it) is not…
Yes, here's the relevant part of the FBX exporter source: https://github.com/blender/blender-addons/blob/master/io_scene_fbx/export_fbx_bin.py#L758 You could test this by exporting an FBX and reimporting it in Blender, seeing if the shape keys (AKA blendshapes, morph targets) are preserved.
I don't do tons of rigging myself but it's really useful for custom picker UIs, and it's also the language that's used in the expression editor. You can write custom drivers in it that do all sorts of neat stuff, and it's also indispensable for dealing with large numbers of morph targets.
Regarding Dalai working on cycles baking, I dont know if thats still a priority but according to the development fund... his work is targeting stereoscopic rendering. March 2014 April 2014 * Grant for Dalai Felinto: finishing work on MultiView (stereo render) Curious to see what hes working on after this...