I think that shadows for point lights using cubemaps is the only new thing as far as the shader generator goes (spotlight and directional light also have shadows, but that’s not so new).
There are however some community efforts to replace the auto-shader with something better.
There’s the Render Pipeline by tobspr Deferred Pipeline w/ Physically Based Shading if you’re targetting modern hardware (ogl 4.3) and want PBR. It has a lot of features.
There’s also my attempt at it - the Auto-Deferred-Shader Auto Deferred Shader it’s more last-gen but has all the basic features and should run on a potato (tested on a atom tablet and 5 year old office pc).
By ‘vertex transforms’ you meant hardware skinning? Animating a mesh with a skeleton on the gpu? If that’s the case then yes, p3d can do that, but I’m not sure if the shader generator can, you may need to write your own shaders… and writing your own shaders may be the best solution to all your problems… then again you’d have to write your own shaders and that can suck (btw p3d has really good support for GLSL).
There’s also some experimental, proof of concept Android support, still in the woods, but it can be done.