I made a long post that partially covers the astro stuff here, if you care to take a look:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=264455&page=2
I might have got into it a little more if there'd been any interest, but the point is there is a definite system there, and to me it makes at least as much sense as the RW system. Just a matter of what you get used to, I guess.
EDIT: Oh, and to quote myself from a later post in that thread, these are the printing errors I noticed (later confirmed for me by Christine), which were probably all touched on in the OP:
A couple other things I will mention, to save you any possible confusion. I own a first printing of the "deluxe" edition and there's a couple of misprints I've found. First, the 2 of Disks shows the degrees as 1-20" (should be 11-20"); and second, both the 7 and 8 of Wands have the wrong ruling planet attributed to them: the 7 of Disks shows the symbol for the Sun as the ruling planet, and the 8 of Disks has the symbol for Mars printed on it - that order should be reversed (7 ruled by Mars and 8 ruled by the Sun). Not sure if these errors were duplicated with subsequent editions, but I figured it was worth mentioning.