Hi Meagan,

Kindly find my response to your inquiries below:
For event creation, can we change the date settings to display as MM-DD-YYYY versus DD-MM-YYYY?
->You can do languange override for this language and see how it goes.
COM_EASYSOCIAL_DATE_DMY12H="M,jS,Y g:iA"
COM_EASYSOCIAL_DATE_DMY24H="M,jS,Y H:i"
refer this date format for more date format.

Also, can we turn off the "Permalink" creation and automatically use title + unique ID? Our users find this step confusing.
-> You can delete the field by:
1. Click Events>Categories>Choose category>Custom field : http://screencast.com/t/1Hpefyxc2