Greetings good sir!
I think the bit about not liking shooting out of combat, is that no other game that I've played lets you do it. Even in the games where you can shoot into combat, there's a risk involved that you might hit your own people. That's something that I accept when there's a risk.
The reason I really don't like it nowin AoS as it allows shooting units to get away with sloppy positioning. There's almost no risk for them to get bogged down by fast moving units as they can still shoot their target AND fight off the pinning unit at the same time. Tactically, this is incredibly irritating. I will get use to it and pretty much have but it's my number one pet peeve about AoS. I love that positioning matters in wargames. It's the main attractor to me playing them instead of just playing a tactical card game like MtG. This rule/ability goes against everything I love in games. You can be sloppy and just dice your way out of the problem. Fleh.
Oh well. At least I know what's what now and can adjust my expectations.
As to GH2, I really wonder if that's going to help IronJawz at all. Even if there's a huge point drops on the Cabbage like 100 and 20 from every other unit, that's really one extra unit to the army. I don't think that's enough really. But we'll see.