Hi there,
1. Good idea – I have the next update almost ready to go, I’ll bake this in before releasing.
2. Not really – the point in excerpts is for the HTML to be stripped. In this next version, the excerpts use the wp_trim_words() function – not sure if there’s a filter in there you can use?
Thanks again for the idea on #1, I’ll be sure to add it 🙂