Hi Steve,
Can you tell me what theme you are using please - on mine the navigation block is dockable using any of the base/standard themes. The only themes I am aware of where the dock does not work are the bootstrap based ones (although there is I believe a fix available that Bas put into his bootstrap theme for 2.4 so hopefully that will find its way into the core version shortly).
Also can you say exactly what page you are not seeing the assignment title on as I can see it in full on my 2.5 version using either Clean (bootstrap) or Standard, on all the assignment pages I have tried. So I suspect these issues may possibly be theme based.
I also have status and grade to the left of the last modified columns - ah apologies, FinalGrade is the right most column (missed it because of exactly your point about the width of the page! ). I think changing the order of these columns would need to be done by modifying the mod/assign/gradingtable.php file.
Richard