Regarding looting, I did notice the same behavior with FFA that you mentioned. At first I didn't like it, but just as it was starting to grow on me (divvy up the loot later while the soulbound stuff was still on timer), I picked up a nice new mace I wanted to put on my tank as it had much better stats than the current weapon. The mace was soulbound and would NOT let me transfer it to another toon in the party, and it was a DPS mace on my healer. Oh well, at least I got 12+ gold selling it.

I now use master looter with the threshold set to rare, which is pretty much what my "loot system" amounted to anyway.