Hi triarius,
I’m just a customer, so my opinion of your request doesn’t really matter. 
But if I were a betting man, I’d bet heavily that L&L is perfectly happy with the Scratchpad feature as is. It’s intended to be a quick & simple little tool, and I’d be shocked if they make any changes to it. After all, they left it completely untouched from Scriv versions 1 to 3, so why would they start tweaking it now?
However, I’m not not here to discourage you, but to share a cool little Scrivener project that @AmberV of L&L support shared in this post, back in January.
It’s a project that Amber set up to look just like the scratchpad! Here’s a screenshot:
How cool is that. It consists of a stripped down Outliner and an Editor. The bit that reads “A note file” is the title of a document in the Outliner, and all the text is the Editor portion of the document.
Because it’s a Scrivener project, you can do all of the things you asked for in your post: format the title text, add flags (icons), sort the titles, etc. And of course much more, because underneath the stripped down appearance is a full-fledged Scrivener project.
You can download the template at the post I linked to above. Give it a try. Hopefully it works for you.
Best,
Jim