Two comments:
-if there's not a property which is the elapsed simulated time (and I feel like it exists, but I can't find it), adding one is two minutes work. Easiest if you send an email to the developer list saying what you need / proposed property location, I think.
- timers firing immediately seems like a bug, a small test case would be interesting. It depends which timer system you're talking about, however. (settimer vs timer objects) Please add the report and test-case to the bug tracker and CC me.
(Related to this, anything which depends on the simulation delta-time variables must tolerate those being 0.0, because there are many scenarios which can cause the dt interval from a frame/update to be zero. That's different to a timer firing after a zero interval of course)