The review is available here.

There is no way to define a local site
Right. That was included in 0.20 release notes. 0.3 will allow to create a local site.
I think this is unacceptable because all web developers first develop on their own machines
"Unacceptable". Hum. Even in a v0.20? In my humble opinion, you are expecting a v1.0 feature level from that 0.20...
I wish N|vu could create documents with different doctypes like XHTML transitional or strict
That's on the TODO list.
Currently these settings are in Format menu under "Page Colors and Background" and "Page Title and Properties". I would suggest the author to merge these 2 menus into one and make it available via right click for easy and fast access
Why not. I have to see it is possible.
Sadly I could not find any way to change the page encoding except modifying the source code.
You can do find using File > Save as charset (that menu item will be renamed "Save and change encoding").
Since I could not find a way to attach an external style sheet to my page
Ah, you missed it. Tools > CSS Editor.  Click on "Link element" button.
I wondered if it could save these inline codes to an external CSS file
It can. Extract the styles of the element using the contextual click on the structure toolbar then open the CSS editor and select the internal stylesheet the application just created. You can export it to the local filesystem.
<style type="text/css">
*#moz_BIYVeVTk3320
{
 margin-top: 0px;
 margin-left-value: 0px;
 margin-left-ltr-source: physical;
 margin-left-rtl-source: physical;
 padding-top: 0px;
 padding-left-value: 0px;
 padding-left-ltr-source: physical;
 padding-left-rtl-source: physical;
}
</style>
This is a bug and should be fixed. Thanks for spotting it out.
Sadly it did not append code to that file but overwrote it
Euhhhhh.... The button says "Export", not "Append"...
It also has a neat preview feature for text, background and borders related styles
Not only text, background and borders. All styles applied through the CSS editor are immediately applied to the document and the effect is instantaneously visible.
One thing I'd love to see is the ability to apply a class or id to a tag by right clicking on it in status bar
That's in the forthcoming version.
While dialog boxes to insert both forms and tables are very simple and yet professional, the default-generated code is again bloated
This will be fixed in forthcoming version.
table body tag being unrequested
according to the HTML 4.01 specification section 11.2.1, at least one tbody element is mandatory inside a table... And Mozilla serializes all elements, there is no way in the DOM to tell if an element was really present in the document instance or was implicit.
One may say that WYSIWYG programs are used by newbies and that they don't care about the code but I strongly disagree, because this was a mistake made by MS FrontPage, and because of that, these days the web is full of wrongly-coded web pages which look different on each browser
Please... FrontPage is a good tool producing bad markup, that's all. It's possible to do wysiwyg and valid markup, we'll prove it.
Again, implementation of a global Properties bar would make developers' lives easier
and increase drastically the size of the editor window or reduce drastically the size of the content area... Our editor should be useable on screens smaller than 21 inches.
This code seems much cleaner, but again it has an unneeded <br> in it
Yes. And we need it to be able to select the empty line. It's a long story and I won't enter into details here but this is a VERY complex problem in Gecko, Mozilla's layout engine, going faaaar beyond Nvu and Composer. We started again recently discussing the issue and we know we have to fix the problem.
When switched back to Source view again I was shocked that N|vu deleted all that code. I think this is a bug.
I agree with that.
One disappointment was that my layer did not have any handles to move or resize itself.
Because the style rules attached to your div were not making it "position: absolute"... We are not going to show resizing handles and a grabber for all divs with an ID. A div with an ID is not a movable object by nature.
No layers support, code somehow gets deleted if it has no content (for layers).
You did that test too fast. You have 3 buttons in the main toolbar allowing to create a layer from the selection in one click, bring a layer to front, or send it to the background.
It still is a very young application and does not yet provide options to insert Flash, Shockwave, Java Applets, Movies and embedded plugins into the page
Right.
I am aware that Mozilla's source view has had a syntax highlighting for at least 3 releases. So I think it should not be too hard to implement it in N|vu.
You are wrong. Mozilla is displaying coloured source. Nvu would have to (a) edit it (b) preserving the selection between the normal view and that view. And that's hard. I started discussed  the thing with Mozilla peers and we have some tracks. I have some extra ideas. But it's harder than you think, trust me.
I think professional web developers will want to wait for the missing parts and features to be implemented
Seriously, that's not our primary target. Pros will always have to rely on much more advanced tools, integrating various technologies and not only a markup editor. We want FIRST to provide average users with a reliable, easy, powerful and clean content editor for the Web. Then we'll think about the pros. I got some feedback that some schools and university departments moved to Nvu. That's part of our target.