Hi @Pilow,
We plan to make LTR available also for mirror backups and metadata backups in the future, but we didn't have the time to do it yet.
Smart mode on mirror incremental backups would be a bit tricky to do, as it would require us to handle incomplete chains of backups, for cases when a tag is removed from a VM and then added back. We might still implement it in the future, though.
About the bug you noticed about VMs showing in backup log despite being excluded, I think it was intentional at some point, but now it would make sense to remove it. Thanks for the feedback, we'll change this.