Now there IS a way around this and stay within Civil 3D, but it means creating a special child style from the style we would normally be using with all the extra information added as text component to the label. This won't help for the leading zeros but at least makes the deed & measured calls work and I even use one of the "one use" styles for my section line IDs. You can also make ones for easement and setback line on plats. Rampant style inflation is a poor solution at best, but so far the only way short of exploding the label to primitives and permanently losing the associativity. After a while it doesn't taste so vile . . . I have expanded this technique to pipe and structure labels with fair success as well.
...and once again, a task that should be simple takes 3x as long as it should.
Ironically, the fact that so many things like this exist in C3D gives me hope about the product. I am currently more-productive in C3D than I was in LDT (albeit probably not enough to offset the cost of transition in any timely fashion), and I waste considerable amounts of time on things like this. If Autodesk simply fixed all the problems like this, I would see significant productivity gains.
Unfortunately, it seems to take Autodesk an awful long time to integrate anything. They already have largely decided what's going into the 2009 release, so any comments that they receive now are highly unlikely to be incorporated before the 2010 release. And that's in the best-case - I STILL haven't seen many of the simple requests I made when using the 2006 version, such as adding "Close Drawing" and "Switch To" to the Settings tab in toolspace, so that it's like the Prospector tab. That's such a simple thing that would add significantly to the usability of the UI, and I got a response from Autodesk that they liked the idea and would be incorporating it into the product, but it still isn't there.
And that doesn't even get into major problems, such as the errors in design for Parcels, the poor design in Label Styles, the lack of PM in the core product, the poor survey support, the failure to integrate Map, etc.