I think being able to use the Shft F2 free view on the bridge is sort of a fluke. What you do is Shift +F2 then pause the game. You can then freely go about the conning tower, up and down the periscope shears, or even walk out on the bow. If you do this while the boat is moving, it just sort of leaves without you.
CTD while in map view.. yah i found that out the hardway
Mouse wheel i dont recal doing much but you could click on crewman and occupy their view. You can still do this with the sonarman, radar man, and in a few boats the helmsman. ANd ya your right, SH3 was a bit mroe intuitive in this regard, and had a bit more functionalty i think.
The wonderful thing about the commands.cfg is theres alot of letover artifacts from SH3 that you can call on that are listed there. The ID handlers for some of these commands are listed here. Say if you want to implemnet on your menu bar to ID a target, formerly a WE command, you can look up the ID handler in the commands.cfg, and call on it from the menu bar. If those command ID handlers werent listed there, we'd have no way of knowing how to call on them.