Rather than having object slide in, I'd like them to either appear and grow to the final size or simply fade in rather than sliding around.

Chris, zooming an element into the canvas is an option at the moment if you work a little outside the box. 

You can set your image to to draw with a 0s draw time, set your camera position for it and then shrink it so it's not/barely visable. Then add the image again directly on top of it in the size you want it and use morph between the 2 images. This creates a zoom effect (have attached a template example).

As for fade in this is already requested so I would 'like' the original post on this thread to lend your support to that.