Well, I’ll give you some of the information that is in my hand at the moment:
You must go the cumbersome way, but you can always create a set of utilities where you can “ease” all of this things.
I have to admit that I always have a bad time with font sizes/labels and lemur/resizing. I can’t say much more about this.
Well, you are talking about another library here (Swing) so, although the wheel mustn’t be reinvented it must be re-implemented.
You have multiple ways
You have the addCommands (if talking about a button) or MouseEventControl if you are with “no-button” panels.
You can do it with animations or without them. You can make them transparent or just detach them.