I would suggest using 1204, as this is where all the development work is happening, especially with trying to get the telecom system back up to spec.
(1) Nobody has added a template to support TDM trunking with Asterisk, as we designed the wizard to handle SIP and IAX trunks, as they are infinitely easier to set up.
(2) there is no _phones_ wizard, only the page in the web admin to configure the phone devices.
(3) Thanks for liking the idea, but the documentation is only as good as what the community can contribute and maintain. This means people like you ferreting out and helping us find issues, because of the sheer scope of this project, we can't keep everything juggled all at the same time, nor expect to support every possible combination of how this software can be set up, at every point in time.
(4) hardware suggestions are just that, suggestions, and again, are put together from successful installations in the community. Those of us with good hardware configurations will post these on the wiki for others to benefit from, what else do you want?
(5) Thank you so much for offering to help with documentation. I would suggest logging onto IRC, irc.freenode.net, and going into #linuxmce (and eventually into #linuxmce-devel) so we can help you (a) get started with a workable solution, and (b) provide a funnel for brain dumping not only the existing documentation on the wiki, but also what's in our heads (which is infinitely more, it's just the way it is...)
-Thom