Back-ported some fixes to the old master branch

I figure since the merge branch hasn't been deemed stable, it still made sense to backport some of the fixes we've done over the last couple of weeks to master.

These particular commits won't cause a merge conflict, but if/when @almathew  decides to back-port the #850, we'll need to rebase the merge branch. Not as scary as it sounds. Trust me, I'm a developer..maybe.