As for the spanned label ... this whole spanning process is so hokey. The flip/reverse doesn't always give the best results. The direction the segment was created in comes into play and it doesn't always play well. I have been able to get some better results by setting the text components right on the arrow, with no offset, and moving the direction arrow to a larger offset.
I can't get the LDD-style label to work with spanned labels - at least, not without more brain-damage than I'm interested in suffering right now. So I'm using the LDD-style label for NOSPAN "dir, dist on same side" labels. It works well for that. I found I also needed to create a "REV" (reversed) version of the style. Basically, the "normal" version has Bearing hooked to Line.1 and Distance hooked to Line.2, while the "REV" version has Bearing hooked to Line.2 and Distance hooked to Line.1.
As for the spanning labels, I might eventually sort through the mess enough to get the LDD-style lable working correctly with SPAN, but initial experiments were disturbing. I found with some experimentation that everthing seems to work if I forget about using the Direction Arrow, and just create 3 different styles. All three have the Bearing and Distance components hooked to the label insertion point, but with varying amounts of X-offset. The first has Bearing and Distance with only a tiny gap, then there's one with a medium-sized gap, then one with a large gap. In some initial testing, it seems like between the three of them, one of them always looks good. Hopefully that holds up in actual practice. Of course, I
still need "normal" and "REV" versions of each of these three, meaning I have SIX styles just to get my "dir, dist on same side of line with SPAN". Yuck! But it seems to work, in horribly-clunky fashion.
I'll still have to wait and see how it works in larger plats, like the one I just did where one boundary line extended through three different pages of the plat. Hopefully I don't have even more issues trying to label something like that... But one problem at a time. I guess there's always general labels, if it comes to that...
There's also the possibility of using more Sites - basically turning a problem lot into its own site, so that it can be labeled as-desired. But I'm trying to avoid creating more Sites that duplicate parcels in my main Site, if I can possibly manage it... This stuff is supposed to stay dynamically-linked, and stuff placed in different sites is logically disconnected. So it seems like this should all be done in one Site, but I don't know if that's possible or not, with the way Autodesk implemented parcels and labels... Guess I'll be finding out.