When installing Koha using dev mode, the Zebra configuration files should really be pulled directly out of kohaclone rather than being copied to koha-dev. This will save a great deal of time and suffering when testing Zebra configuration changes, and bring the behavior more in line with standard mode (which always uses the latest version at time of install).
This is a great idea - why are we not doing this?
This would be cool but I don't think it's likely to ever be done, especially as we're on the road to Elasticsearch