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Probably best to stick with 251 right now if you want stability. HWA being built in isn't really a big feature. It is handy but it is still simple enough to just load up HWA separately.
1. I haven't really checked out the examples much... but if they serve their purpose then I don't really see the big issue. Could they be better? Sure, but so could anything.
As for demo games... I dunno. I mean I guess the demos should be showing off the full power of MMF? I didn't even know people played the demos. :p
As for changing from Standard to Direct3D 9... well yeah, because Standard is not hardware accelerated. :p
2. Honestly I'm not sure what DirectX is there for. Standard is non HWA, and Direct3D is HWA... so you pretty much always want to use HWA nowadays... since it takes advantage of the video card.
3. Extensions are a double edged blade. On one side, you get these features that otherwise wouldn't exist. On the other side, you have to deal with cross platform compatibility issues. My advice... if you really want to make a game and it requires certain non-cross platform extensions to do it, then you'll just have to bite the bullet and not be cross platform. Either that, or you will have to make a cross platform extension... or find a way to do it without extensions.
I've always had the opinion that you really can't complain about extensions. Most of them are made by third parties and the majority of them are free. So complaining about free stuff made by members of the community is like one of the worst possible things you could do in a community.
I already have a feeling you are going to ask why Clickteam doesn't just include these extensions built into the program... Again, it goes back to time, cost, the fact that the extensions were not made by Clickteam, etc...
Think of extensions like photoshop brushes or user made fonts. They are just additional things that you can create/share/use. They are not meant to be actual features in MMF. Though MMF does lack certain features that really should be included... so do all programs, and I'm sure that MMF3 will add quite a few of these lacking features as well.
Once you spend some time with the program and try out the extensions, you will quickly figure out which extensions you will be using a lot and which ones you will probably never use. My advice is to just get every extension that you can. You can always sort the majority of them from the extensions list into different categories.
Also a lot of them have information in their properties about who made them, and when they were released, and help documentation. I've always found it is good to check if the extension is still in development or if it was made recently. If it is 4 years old, it might have been discontinued and if there are issues with it, you might not ever get them fixed. So it is just sort of a risk you take.
The trade off is that you get great features that you most likely couldn't have done yourself.
There's nothing wrong with using 252. There have been no reported instabilities as far as I have seen, heard, or experienced. I don't use extensions for anything that I don't need to, but I'm not going to be naive and refuse to use an extension that makes my life much better. For example, Tile Cost (which I contracted Looki to make), Surface (which Looki is awesome for making), A* Pathfinding (Which I could do without, but the algorithm is much faster in the extension), and String Tokeniser, a nice little extension for parsing strings that really makes it way more convenient. I'm not going to use an extension like "Advanced Direction Object" because I understand the formulas it uses, and by using them myself I have full platform compatibility and power over changing them. It's a nicer way to program.