a few thoughts about your post,
good point, I forgot to add this to my feature request list 
(I do after replying here! )
so…
I spoke to Embodme about the sensitivity whilst at Superbooth.
they told me the ‘actuation’ pressure was about as low as it can go.
(if you’ve played with surfaces, you’ll know this is, due to noise, a trade off against false touches)
however, for sure they could do something with velocity and pressure curves.
Ive seen from using the API, internally there is more resolution than the 7 bit we see via midi.
so essentially pressure/velocity curves are simply a matter of how you map that response on the sensor.
(I also wonder if they could allow us similar when using bipolar Y value - perhaps to express an S curve around the centre point)
In Ableton, I did play with adjusting velocity/pressure curves, and found settings I preferred.
however this is not optimal for 2 reasons:
a) we want it standalone !
b) ableton can only map 0-127 to 0-127, it cannot use the higher resolution of the sensors
(I do want to do some tests via the API, to look at how this might feel when using direct sensor data)
(I assume by template here, you mean elements)
perhaps you could define each ‘pad’ as an separate element, for many elements types you can have up to 48 elements - so Id have thought for drum pads that would be sufficient.
@keymanpal documented this here
you can resize the key elements (as you can any element)
I find that with 3 wide (rather than the default 4) , the spacing is very similar to a conventional keyboard.
though there are some limitations with touch spacing, as I mentioned in [this post]
(Firmware - feature requests - #2 by thetechnobear) .
I do think this is the best approach for arbitrary key-mappings, since the nice thing about drumpad/keypad
is that you do NOT have to do every key, which would be laborious to do (for musical mappings)
however, I don’t think any flat surface is going to feel/play like a piano surface, due to having very little travel - so I tend to use the isomorphic layouts… though like having the piano layout available.
this is the kind of thing, Id recommend having a chat with @embodme about - perhaps something that can be improved.
I think we should remember that this is version 1.0… I think its easy to forget, that the Linnstrument firmware has been improved (dramatically) over many iterations and years… when the first firmware was released it didn’t feel anywhere near as good as it does now, nor have many of the features that now exist.
this is a testament to the amount of work Geert put in over the years to keep on improving it.
… will Embodme have the same commitment to the Erae Touch, we simply don’t know, much to early to say, so we need to give them our feedback and give them some time to improve things
I personally think as a v1, its remarkably stable/useable - and with some minor improvements can be fantastic.
Overall, I really do hope @embodme engage with its community.
many of us here, have seen many MPE controllers come n’ go, and too many that are very promising, but that have a few quirks that get in the way of the playing experience.
the Linnstrument is a good example, where they really wanted to get it right… and continued to ‘polish’ it, to become the best experience it could be … and as a result, still today has a really good reputation, and is a controller many will still recommend.
Id love to see @embodme follow this example!