About the cancelling: At the very beginning I wanted the same. Why can't we cancel missions? Can't be that difficult to implement. Then I thought, this is part of the strategy. To make sure, you can send the crusaders on middle length missions while still being able to start other - potentially more important missions. At that time, I was opposed to suggestions like yours. Now, though: I think, why not? Maybe not to cancel missions and get the crusaders back immediately, though.

Because, let's think about the RPG-part of the missions. You send out crusaders to missions to fulfill a task. You can't give them a call, can you? And even so, the Girl's are already out for their night. The hunt for the new crusader has been started already. So, what I could think of is: You can abort or cancel the mission, but your crusaders need time - 50% of the remaining time maybe - to get back in formation. With this, it is still quicker to get them back, but requires patience nevertheless. Oh, and of course, you would loose that mission. With this, there could be another talent, which reduces these 50% down to something more exciting.

About the single talent to start with less than needed crusaders: With this, I still am in the state of opposing. I still think it is part of the games' strategy that you have to chose the right way to distribute all of your crusaders on all the slots. But that's just my view on this :-)

here is one of her confirmations if anyone is interested:
Posted Tuesday at 1:12 PM
Erika/Alyniana (CNE Dev)
@ Raymond: Missions have different generation times, as well as factoring in their behind the scenes cooldown. They will never give you 10 right away if you complete 10 in a row. You will need to wait longer for the ruby and Idol ones. The only quickly returning ones are a couple of the gold and EP ones.

And i agree with Andreas, in putting people out on a missions even if you get 100% with fewer then the required people, you personally must decide who else to tie up on that mission. pure and simple.

Would this be the right place, to also add the idea to have more than the current numbers of missions available in parallel? Right now, I still have to think about how to distribute my crusaders to run as many missions in parallel as possible.

What I am afraid of is to lose this kind of strategy when - in half a year or 12 months, we have 30+ crusaders to chose for 11 missions.

On the other hand: With all the event crusaders coming in, having 4 EP missions in parallel might not be enough to keep the chance to get them to 200 EP. So, maybe as a long term though, it might be a good idea to either raise the amount of missions or to have more missions which give more than one EP.