Hi,
i cant comment on the waterbed until i see a pic of your machine but i may be able to help with the other questions,
i dont know what post processor you are using in sheetcam but this will be where you problem is for the m01 optional stop, i think some posts have a variable in them which stops the machine to allow you to check the consumables before continuing, i think it is called "piercelimit" have a look in you post this may be the problem, the post can be edited using wordpad.
the trouble with fonts will be to do with how the cad program is exporting them, i cant remember the details but it think its something like sheetcam wont recognise splines only curves and so if your cad program exports text as splines sheetcam will not pick them up. Personallyt i use corel draw for anything with text in it and it has an option to "convert to curves" which solves the problem but the export is not very good, also check out sheetcam tng, it has the ability to put text into a part.
As for the pierce delay i found with sheetcam that the pierce delay number i put in didnt appear to correspond to seconds, my value for 6mm plate is 1500 i think, try a big value and see if it makes any difference, also if you are using a thc sheetcam may not be the problem, usually the thc uses an arc good signal and puts in its own pierce delay after the arc good signal or use a dleay in mach so the problem could also be here.
hope ive helpsed a bit not just confused you!