Just my 2 cents. :D

I came from a CI background and had the same feeling as you when I first started to use Laravel. The question: Where did the dynamic routing go? After reading this from the guy who actually participate in developing CI, I started to re-think about auto-routing. http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/07/beware-the-route-to-evil

Whether we should use auto-routing is still remained an open question. ( It is indeed some sugar in the beginning of the development ) The bottom line is that, automatic routing sometimes might lead to unexpected result when someone hits a route that isn't expected to be exposed.

Laravel routing starts to make sense to me because I have complete control on how the route should look.

Back to the question you have asked.

1. This is just a brief usage, not too practical. :D

// Static pages, NO controllers involved. 
Route::get('{page}.html', function($page) {
    // views/static/*.blade.php
    $dir = 'static.';
    if(View::exists($viewPath = $dir.$page)) {
        return View::make($viewPath);
    }
    else {        
        // views/errors/not_found.blade.php
        return View::make('errors.not_found');
    }
});

// I personally DO NOT recommend this usage. 
// As this approach is considerably dangerous and tedious to "simulate" the same action like CI
// For controller-like usage, briefly. NOT practical and Validation required. 
Rout::get('{controller}/{action}', function($controller, $action) {
    $controller = ucwords($controller).'Controller';
    App::make($controller)->{$action}();
});

A better approach could be

// In this case, Route order matters, if you have the above static pages route setup. 
Route::controller('user', 'UserController');

UserController.php

class UserController extends BaseController {
     public function getIndex()
     {        
     }

     public function postIndex()
     {  
     }
}

2. Not sure if this is the best practice, but you could something like this,

Route::get('foo/{arguments?}', function() {
    $segments = Request::segments();
    // Do whatever you want in $segments array

})->where('arguments', '(.*));

3. I would suggest using a main layout and load sub-view using Blade. http://laravel.com/docs/templates