I haven't used the free content vault at all yet on CS and did not use it heavily with full Designer.
eh? There is no free content vault I'm aware of. The Altium Live / designcontent thingy is a paid subscription. It happens to come for 1 year with your purchase of CS.
Someone did post a script here on how to download the entire vault locally though. It worked a treat for me. Even though I have 3 yrs CS support in my particular setup it's much nicer to have the vault content locally. [minus the fact, as Simon laments, that the content itself is spotty, dependent on manufacturer]
One problem I consider "fundamental" in Altium Designer and also CS and also every other PCB CAD package I have used is that they're *so* strictly focused on ECAD that they are darn near useless at even the most fundamentally necessary and trivial aspects of MCAD or let's call it "library science".
... [ parametric data is not retained ] ...
Well luckily there's this easy to use program called library expert which does exactly that. Now of course, the parameters used to construct a footprint aren't visible in your ECAD software but by naming the footprints systematically you can instantly verify the parameters by the footprint name. Otherwise you do have to fire up the library expert tool, but the consolation is that when you switch ECAD packages you aren't a slave to their different footprint tool, you just can rely on what you did in library expert and so you gain portability.