I'm not about to quote all that so:
if you wanted to destroy all bullets there are four ways you can do it, off the top of my head.
First there is a System - Advanced Collision condition, that allows you to choose whether either object involved gets picked. If no instances of an object are picked, it's as if all of them were picked. you could use that.
You could use the 'family trick', where you put the bullets in a family called "blue" lets say. And on collision with bullet, blue.destroy. Families have their own separate picking lists, so you can do things like bullet, on collision with blue, and control the hitting bullet, and 'hitee' separately. in this case, since only the bullet was involved in the collision, all blues(bullets in that family) would be destroyed
you could use a function, this is messy as you said, unless the process involves more than just a simple destroy. you could make a function that destroys all bullets. and function calls allow you to choose whether or not picking is conserved inside the function
you could use my 's' plugin. it intimidates alot of users, and indeed it's more advanced core features have probably the largest learning curve of any construct plugin I'm aware of, but there are several handy easy to use things as well. In this case, there is a Pick Object action, and a Pick Object condition. They serve the same purpose, just allow you to use them in two different places. All this does is allow you to choose any object type, and order construct to pick a specific instance, unpick a specific instance, pick all that type, unpick all of that type. You can also choose whether it's picked as itself, or as a family, so you can say pick all bullets as blue, and even if there are other things in the blue family, it would only pick all the bullets there.
there's also python, but that's overkill if you're not already using python, which unlike gamemaker, scripting isn't needed for even very advanced games, with very unique needs. I wouldn't recommend even touching python, until you realize how you can make everything you think you can't make without it.
Controlling views. You can control views directly with the system object. controlling scrollx and y and zoom, globally as well as independently for each layer. A simple way to make a great camera is to make an invisible sprite object, and just tell the camera to "always" scroll to that object. Then put a bullet behavior on that invisible sprite, and make it always follow what you want at a speed based on the distance, that way it smoothly slows as it approaches objects. any type of movement you can conceive of except for 3d camera rotation is possible with these few simple system actions. also, there is a 3rd party 'magiccam' plugin which does alot of neat stuff for you, but I haven't used it myself, nor kept track of it's stability or development
there's no handy tile editor as of yet (though there is grid snapping), other than cool examples made with construct you can probably find in the tutorials section of the forum. the platform school tutorial if I remember correctly had some ugly square tiles covered with pretty graphics, and that's a perfectly valid and common way to do it. If you mean one large tileset sprite, and you only reveal whichever part you need, this would be an involved process using uv distortion, which is entirely possible, but not the easy way to do it. the straightforward way is to load all the separate tiles into a single sprite animation. set the animation speed to 0, and then just switch frames in the editor like this :
If by multiple views with multiple huds, you mean split screen, there have been a few examples of someone doing this with the canvas mostly. there's was a particularly awesome one here:
I also came from GameMaker, which I purchased long long ago. The second I tried to create a script that did bezier curves, or split a convex polygon into multiple triangles though, it completely choked showing me that the engine wasn't capable of anything truly computationally complex. I can assure you that construct is capable of doing anything, gamedesignwise, that gamemaker can do in a much more intuitive way. seriously, try out the ghost shooter tutorial, and if you're like me, you'll be in love with construct halfway through it. then move onto 'platform school' tutorial, and dropout halfway through once you "get it". once you understand the basic workflow and logic to construct, you'll likely find that it's much more simple and enjoyable to make anything you can think of then you would have even hoped possible. pretty much any 2d gametype or feature you can think of, you can make.