Nervous about Vacation Mode

I am a one-man shop on Handmade, and I am also FBM so I handle the entire process myself. That said, I get pretty busy, I haven't had a day off in about a year and a half, and I'd like to change that.

However, I've read some stories about the effect that vacation mode can have and I just wondered if anyone (or Amazon) can help me work through this.

1. It's my understanding that vacation mode completely removes your shop and listings from Amazon until you return. Aside from the obvious loss of visibility and sales, what kind of impact has this had on your shop when you've gone on vacation? Was there any long-term effect and/or how long did it take to recover your normal activity? On my regular travel schedule, I typically would be gone for several weeks, several times a year. I just...haven't...because I haven't sorted this out.

2. Zeroing out inventory would be perfect, but it doesn't help because it still gets hidden. I assume all of the "this item isn't currently in stock" items I see on Amazon are FBA? Is there an FBM equivalent for this? It would sure be nice to maintain visibility, even without the sales.

3. I've bought things that had a future ship date of multiple weeks (for example, I have an iPad ordered from Amazon right now that may not even arrive until March, it says.) Is it possible for us to do this, somehow? Or is there a function to let people backorder items? If there is, I haven't found it.

Any suggestions are welcome, or even just confirming "yup...vacation mode is it, it sucks, and there's no alternative"