hi, for the future, please ask one question at a time and use matching titles... that makes it easy for other users to find answers to their future questions... and for us to giving a fast answer / check if the questions have been (correctly) answered :-)
1/ how would you want scribus to solve this? (except masking...)
2/ no, vectors objects are not objects but groups of vectors... i would love to have vector frames, but it's not there...
3/ what? which version of scribus?
but, generally speaking, in some circumstances it's dangerous to write the first or last character in a line. i know stupid, but you get used to it, when you have local formatting (sadly, not only scribus has issues with those corner cases).
4. ctrl / cmd (i guess)
ciao
a.l.e