Yesterday I spent the evening putting the entries from my cheat sheet into the saved searches mask. I even added a few more details and tested it thoroughly.
It now works great and will save me a lot of time in the future!
I still need a checklist to edit my EPUBs because I need to do three separate runs of 'saved searches' for different kinds of files and with different Regex/Normal and AllFiles/CurrentFile settings. There are also some more things to do that can't be part of find&replace operations (like adding an HTML TOC, adding a cover, editing metadata). But these things are quickly done (unlike a long list of manual replace operations).
So I'm very happy with what I learned in this thread.