JJ2 actually DOES have the capability to respawn these sorts of tiles... in offline race mode. And not as generators: the regular events just respawn automatically. They just pop back into existence, no "sparkle" like with other events.

It's actually a bit stranger than that. He took a picture of a fire truck, converted it into a j2l file, and then filled it in using regular JCS, so it was playable. Getting around the text string limit (among the other tricks that level uses) involved hacking the j2l file itself. I think it was mostly done "by hand", meaning no GUI available, though I think there was a custom made DLL file involved.

As far as I know there hasn't ever been any real working "JCS+" program which can do everything JCS can do. The best tool available right now is Reworder, which allows you do do tricks that JCS can't do, but it isn't an editor by itself. Realistically, that kind of program is probably all you're going to ever see: utilities that augment JCS, rather than replace it. JJ2+ is another example of this approach, since allows you to declare a level as having death-pits, or create special triggers.


And in response to the 16 text string limit, Violet said it right: give it time. Who knows, someone might release a utility that gets around this limit.... Barring that, the "next big thing" will probably be the scripting language that's in development right now. One of the things it does is let you change game variables. Text strings are stored in an array somewhere, so all you'd need to do is write a line of code like this (just an example, since I'm pretty sure this feature isn't implemented yet):
To put it simply, you'd still be limited to 16 per level, but being able to change any of them at any time you want effectively removes this limit and allows an infinite number of text strings. A more complex (actually a lot more complex from what I've heard) solution involves getting rid of text strings alltogether, and just using a DisplayText() function to print whatever you want on-screen.