There is no need for the alpha setting. Alpha works right out of the box with Dithering which is similar to alpha hash. As for overall improvements. They are adding new features available in newer GPUs, Some Raytrace elements, Global illumination, and removing the light limit or at least increasing it. In case you didn’t know there was a limit of 8 sun lamps and 128 non sun lamps. The goal is something like 65K light if I remember correctly. They also want to clean up the code and improve render times. There are also a list of “Paper Cuts” that they will try to include as well. Paper Cuts is the Blender developers term for things that are annoying or would be nice to add to Blender, but isn’t a priority. You can find a lot of these listed and discussed through Blender community’s Right Click Select. If a topic gets enough votes the developers will increase the priority to work on that feature.
