I've passed on your feedback to our software team. We're aware that this takes time and we'll see what we can do about it.
We're working on getting the same functionality as on the Almond for the screen, i.e. a timer which the user can set so the backlight turns off after x seconds, but we're a little bit behind on this feature, but it's coming. As we don't turn off the touch sensitive area of the screen, you simply tap the screen to wake it up again.