Well, I'll be honest: I didn't look at the .capx
1 & 2: What I would do would be create the reels as sprites. Since sprites have a built-in animation, you could have the reel simply stop animating at whatever frame the button is hit. You can also change the framerate on the animation without affecting anything else.
3: To achieve the 'easing' effect, I think you would want to split the reel's animation up. Have a seperate animation within the sprite for each possible result of the reel. The animation's frames go from the previous image off-center to the ending frame, which is a locked-in-place image.
[attachment=0:2b7m9896][/attachment:2b7m9896] As so.
So you have an event, where until a button is pressed, the Reel's animation A proceeds to B when A ends, when B ends go to C, etc, until you come back to A. when the button is pressed, the animation proceeds to its end, and stops.
Make sense?