Basically that yea, it's an interface issue of not having anywhere to put it. I guess we could add a dot or circle in the middle of the compass or something, and light it up if there's a hostile enemy near you?
Part of the problem is that the compass is basically there to mitigate the fact that in the original your view distance was incredibly constrained, so you needed to refer to it constantly to look out for danger. Also it doesn't integrate that well with shifting your view persistently (with the HJKL keys), since if you shift your view to be able to see a monster it removes that information as you're saying.
Now that I'm thinking of it, it'd be nice to have it turn yellow if you're close to being spotted, I think it has all the info it needs to make that decision already...
RE: Wounds, what I'd like to do long-term is add specific wounds (bruises, cuts, gashes, fractures, etc) and mostly phase out HP. A subset of the concepts is outlined here:
http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=448.msg13713#msg13713 So you're not worried about taking 10 HP of damage, you're worried about a "deep cut", that might get infected if you don't take care of it.
At a very high level this is reminicent of how DF handles things, but we don't have a totally rigged-up body system, and don't really want one, so it'll be a good bit simpler in practice.
I know people are concerned about things getting too complicated to handle, a major focus would be on making sure that treating routine injuries wouldn't be a grind.