Hi Glome,
I think I can solve most of your questions, but you will have to do a little digging on your own....
There is a new vehicle package available on both Realspawn's Newbie site, and the Acknex Resource site. It comes with two script files, one for vehicle movement, and one for five different camera views. I'm not sure what you mean by "no templates", but both of these are designed to be "templates", even though they do not use skills or flags.
The package includes eleven documentation files. The doc file on the camera script goes into some detail about how to accomplish what you want, why you are seeing the problem you are, and how the trig instructions work. Best of all, you can pull the camera script out, and use it with other scripts, including the overhead view and the view with "auto zoom" built in.
Also includes gravity and movement script, as well as tilting, leaning, ramp jumping, rock back and on-screen HUD displays.

Should keep you busy for a little while....
Please let me know if you have any problems with it, and thanks for offer to answer any questions!