I was doing a scan through recent posts and realised that you didn't get a reply to your follow up questions (sorry).
1. At present there isn't a way for a visitor to save a set of filters that they wish to apply to their newsletter list of events. It is a shared set of criteria - but you could always use multiple newsletters as an alternative approacj
2, There is a demo of the event registration features of RSVP Pro at
http://rsvp.jeventsdemo.net but not the reminders I'm afraid. You can setup a single reminder prior to the event (not 2 I'm afraid). If you wanted to try out RSVP Pro by joining the club and found that it didn't do what you needed you could request a refund and cancel your membership.
3. We have our own tags implementation - there hasn't been much demand to move this over to the Joomla tags system