Hey there! Don't have an answer for either, sorry, but maybe a workaround for 2).
Rather than trying to find an action for Playmaker, I'd probably just duplicate the animation cycle in Animator. If a cycle needs to be played 3x for example, you could just copy the key frames in the base cycle, copy and paste them twice and save it as a new animation that can then be called.
Not the most elegant solution, but simple and it should work