Merge of lots of pull requests

This PR merges PR's #784, #844, #1004, #1023, #1032, #1049, #1050, #1082, #1086, #1104, #1111, #1128, #1131, #1139, #1140, #1161, #1162, #1166, #1169, #1172 onto the current master (although not necessarily in that order). This is a collection of (hopefully) the least objectionable PR's that are outstanding, mostly bugfixes and new `LinkHints` actions.

This completely fixes issues #175, #301, #331, #484, #599, #776, #812, #888, #960, #968, #980, #1047, #1080, #1093, #1096, #1109, #1126, #1144, #1156, #1165, #1171, and makes progress on several others (plus some unreported ones).