Settings and activity

Yes. PLEASE! I'd buy multiple for colleagues.

I'm not following you on what you mean by 'build'. Do you mean a project? Or are you speaking of the different versions/builds of Octopus Deploy itself?

Have you looked at the elastic and transient environments capability?
https://octopus.com/docs/deployment-patterns/elastic-and-transient-environments

Specifically the 'Deploy to transient targets'?
https://octopus.com/docs/deployment-patterns/elastic-and-transient-environments/deploying-to-transient-targets

It might be what you're looking for. You can create the targets, assign roles and all and they would initially be 'unavailable', in your process you might have a step that would create those targets, add a step to perform a health check (mentioned in second link) the process would see the new targets available and the remaining steps would be able to use those newly available targets.

I believe this is already available, when creating a step template select the 'Deploy a Package' type. Much like 'Deploy a package' in a project's process. You can then customize the pre,deploy,post powershell scripts in that template.

You can't do exactly what you are stating (add a package variable) to a 'run as script' template, start from the 'Deploy a package' one and that may help.

Bump on this one. This has bit us in the past..wait coworker just updated me. Still biting. Just to clarify I'm referring to server roles (in environment dashboard). I simple name new and then remove the old is what causes the extra workload.