Jeff,I can answer some of these. The only delay time between banks is that which occurs while the radio reads the data from the control channel, ~1 sec. There has been discussion of control channel reacquisition but that only happens if a system has NO activity on it for more than ~10 secs. or so, or if you have actually lost the control channel for some reason. The number of banks you have multi-trunking will not affect those numbers.
You can alpha tag any ID: Whether Talk Group or Private Call ID. There is no difference as far as alpha tagging is concerned. Individual IDs seen during Private Calls (called I-Calls by Uniden) are only displayed during a Private Call or Phone Interconnect. You won't see the individual ID of the participants in a normal talk group type call, only the Talk Group ID.
Someone has figured out how to use the Beep Alert in concert with the Status Bits to get an Emergency Activation notification with a Motorola system. Sounds like it would work, but I have not tried it myself.
CC only mode will work with conventional freqs in the same bank.
"And it seems the cc mode won't work in a conventional search, correct?" -- I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you are scanning a bank set up as conventional freqs only, you are correct, CC only won't work. If you are asking whether the Search function works in a trunked bank with conventional freqs in there too; yes, you can Search for trunked system IDs. When the radio gets to the conventional freqs in that bank it will Scan them.
You probably don't want ot put multiple trunked systems in the same bank. The radio will only find and use one control channel without some intervention on your part. To get to the other one you would have to lock out the one ahead of it. Kind of a pain.
You could put Smartzone systems in multiple banks, but if a conversation moves off of one site and into another it would be luck if you picked it up on the next site unless you had very few Talk Groups to scan in each bank.
I don't know the answer to the CTCSS question off the top of my head. I will say this: Don't buy the radio for its CTCSS capability. It is not Uniden's proudest achievement.
Hope this helps.
Greg Knox