The bonus materials are, as their name implies, bonus scenes which are not part of the game's continuum. They are made as rewards for certain tiers of patrons.
The mod's thread is linked in the op and that should tell you everything you need to know about it.
Nerds, on the internet? On a forum? Unheard of!
It's just common practice to start from 0.1 and keep going with 0.x until the game reaches a mature state and you can call it 1.0, which usually means it's a "release/complete" version. We don't know how many versions there will be before that.
I don't know if there's better ways to allocate your raid resources, but it's very likely that you simply can't do any better and that could be an intended trade-off for the independent route. There's still the possibility that future content will let you get the troops you need, so maybe just wait for it.
Ok, it's hard to tell you exactly how to deploy your troops without knowing exactly what the stats of your units are, but I will give you an overview of exactly how this combat encounter works, so you can determine how to get the best result here. If you tell me the combat, defense, and raid stats of your three units, I can probably figure out the optimal path for your raid.
There is a mod linked in the OP, called JDMod. It allows among other things to toggle gallery unlock.
You can use console to cheat there too. You just need to find the right variable. For instance for the tutorial raid it's tutorialraidscore.
The variable used for the Bandit Raid Encounter is temp1, which is a temporary variable used in several encounters throughout the game. It is reset to 0 at the beginning of the encounter. I'm unfamiliar with the use of the console to change variable values, but I think if you change the value of temp1 after you have assigned units to the Assault regions in the first phase of the encounter, but before the results are revealed at the end of the encounter, you can determine the outcome of the raid. Any value of temp1 above 12 at the end of the encounter will give you the best possible results, but temp1 can be decreased at several points throughout the encounter. You would probably want to set temp1 to a value well above 12 (20, perhaps?) to ensure the best result, if you wanted to change it via the console.
Thought temp1 was used only in the banditintroraid label. But I didn't really look up for all raids, so you are probably right. Though there's also a temp2 somewhere in there.
