Some Basic SSIS Questions

I have been working with SSIS and find myself stopped on what seem like very basic tasks.

Am I right in thinking that, if you want to import a flat file into a SQL datatable, in most PC based systems, that you have to manually cast EVERY SINGLE COLUMN to unicode string, if you don't want to get the 'cannot convert between unicode and non-unicode string data types'? I mean, this is surely a VERY COMMON task, taking a CR/LF delimited ASCII file and dumping it into a database tables? What if you have 50 fields to import?

Am I the only one who finds it very difficult to cast a string from a textfile to a date format? At this point, I always just dump the date to a 8 character string and save it that way, and use a SQL view to cast it to a date. At least SQL Server can do 'basic date conversions'. Is there any way to freeze execution and find out what data was provided to a derived column, if you're trying to do some substring operations and hodge together a date? I couldn't find any. I usually put a extra column in a datatable and plunk some data there to find out 'what it looked like', how else can you debug an SSIS program?

Is there a planned service pack or update to SSIS that will make this more usable? Does Microsoft ever intend to implement an UPSERT type module? Or a File Move operation that handles directories that fill up with log files, each of which have to be added to a datatable and then moved to an archive directory (surely, another very common task - I figured out how to accomplish this but it is far from intuitive, the way it currently works). Sorry for grumbling, but honestly, I find turnaround time to develop a very simple import program is RIDICULOUS. It's quicker to write a COBOL program to issue a bunch of formatted SQL UPDATE statements than using this application.