Thank your for your suggestions.
A quick feedback.
1. Locations must be portal wide atm, otherwise the master/sub calendar structure would not work. I understand that browsing through 1.000 is not easy. However, that was not the scope of the current version.
2. Multiple categories would be nice indeed. As for category and location per instance, see my previous point, they must be portal wide atm.
3 The events module is optimized for the integrated DNN search. If your events are on public pages, the event module generates the events in the SEO sitemap (using templates you can influence). In that case Google search should work in the best possible way.
4. You can use the DNN Reports module to configure such a display. If you have some experience with SQL (it seem to me you have), it should not be such a difficult task.
BTW If you have created a DNNreports definition for last Events, please submit the export XML file of DNN Reports as pull request (enhancement suggestion with attached code) to the Events module on GitHub. The good news is that you do not have to be a develper to submit pull requests...