We're still debating the control surface decision. There are two reasons for leaving things alone:
1. hardware surfaces have had different use conventions for a long time (certainly things that look like mixing consoles). They are effectively multitouch devices, and human interaction with them just isn't the same as with a mouse & GUI.
2. for Mackie Control Protocol devices, we already provide a nifty multi-target action there where you just press and hold one eg. solo button and then press another, to apply it to the range that was pressed.
We do not providing scripting for developing control surface support. I've written extensively about my thoughts on Reaper's scripting [0] and I remain conflicted by the questions it raises. There's nothing that can be done in Reaper via scripting that can't be done in Ardour via C++, and a huge amount that theoretically could be done in Ardour via C++ that cannot be done in Reaper. I know this is not a satisfactory answer for people who do not want to master (a) C++ (b) the build environment.
[0] https://discourse.ardour.org/t/is-open-source-a-diversion-fr...