Love this component, friendly bump on this topic to see if you have ideas for workarounds.
1.) I have began dropping value of gift cards to 0.00 when they are fully redeemed. And writing a message in the message field about the redemption date etc. I think this is a valid workaround the only preference perhaps that is easiest to add to this would be if we didnt have to use the customer "message" on gift card field and instead had an admin comment box.
2.) For the physical gift card "sent" option we are adding -SENT to the gift card number to let us know we have sent the gift card.
3.) For sending to offline, phone, cash gift card purchases etc, setting paypal to sandbox is one solution for that but far from ideal.