"Being prepared for shipping" is actually "DHL - erfasst". I just translated it for the forum. It's when the shipment has been electronically generated with DHL. We only do this once the order is paid. Only in rare circumstances do we ship when it's unpaid, for example because we know the B2C customer or it's a B2B order.
Refunded - no, unfortunately. It can mean we just refunded or that something was returned and is sellable. In the latter case, though, we typically do "cancel". It's not clean but it works as a hack. The whole refund system is somewhat a mess. Also, the states don't play too well with third party modules, eg for VAT calculation.
We don't use ASM because we've heard of all the problems with it.
I agree with you, the system could use some improvement.