Mate Controller questions?

We just upgraded to SW2017, and I am working with Mate Controller for the first time.  I see it could be quite useful, but it seems to be VERY unfriendly.

I had one in my assembly with 3 different positions of some subassemblies.  I would click on one, and it would sometimes update the model, other times not.  Even when clicking the update button.  I then clicked the "add configuration" button on each one.

I did not like the configuration name "mate controller xxxxxxxxxxxx", so I renamed them to something shorter and descriptive.

Now the mate controller that was at the bottom of the feature tree is gone, so I cannot use it to easily tweak positions, have to open each configuration and make the changes to each constraint manually.

Did renaming the configurations destroy the mate controller links?

Another question:  When the mate controller was there, I could not change the name of "position 1", but could name all other positions, so I had the cryptic "position 1", and the rest named something useful. (That is mainly why I renamed the created configurations).

It seems that this function could be FAR more useful if you could create multiple mate controllers, and name them something descriptive, instead of just having mate controller 1, mate controller 2, etc.

SolidworksAssemblies