On the aliases, am I hearing this right.
100 nxt instead of 1 nxt per alias?
You can use whatever fee you'd like. If someone else tries to register the same alias at the same time, then the higher fee transaction will get the alias.
and its not just that...
the account that will build the next block just chooses highest fees from ALL possible candidate transactions, regardless of whether or not its a request for a NXT transfer or a request to assign an alias. So just because you are the ONLY person to request an alias name, if you set too low a fee and too low a deadline, your request may expire before it is selected to be built into a block