The things you described in this post are somewhere on the top of my list of "stuff I want to learn". :) Good work and keep on blogging!
The reason for introducing @Query is that we support some additional quirks (defining a count query e.g.) in it besides the fact which Fabian mentioned. Regarding the potential change of being able to use @NamedQuery on a method I don't think this is gonna happen as this does not make sense in a pure...