The front matter feature was only just added to the Windows version in the last update. Of course it won’t be discussed in any books yet. I suppose we could have just left it out entirely because it doesn’t do everything the Mac version does yet, but that seems a bit silly. It is useful as it is for many things.
I’m sorry you were under the impression that Scrivener was designed for publication tasks. That has never been its purpose. It is for writing, and the various tasks involved in writing, alone. Nearly everyone that is self-publishing is going to require multiple tools in order to finish the project, just like the pro houses do. What I’m describing here is a routine five minute fix. It’s not even worth mentioning.
There already is a list, right in this very forum, pinned to the top: Differences Between the Mac and Windows Versions. This one has not yet been updated for the 1.7 release however, so it has some things listed that are no longer missing.
All of the placeholder tags are documented in the appendix by the same name in the user manual. You can also insert common counter tokens, such as the <$r> tag for lowercase Roman numerals, in the Edit/Insert/Auto-Number/ sub-menu.
But nothing is going to “block” the page number from within the text editor.