Yeah, I think this is something Insignia wanted pulled out of the spec during development.
A lot of people thought the whole alarm system was too complex in the 3.5" devices, so in the 8" device there were attempts to "simplify" it all - in the I8 it resulted in removal of some things, in the C8, it meant splitting up "alarms" and "actions" in the UI, even though they are, internally, exactly the same thing. On the 3.5" devices, we had the "simple alarm".
There were actually many things that were on the list to *add* to the alarm/action system, but would have made the entire thing unmanageable for an average user. The compromise was to add the various hacks documented on the wiki.