Hi! The rope is subject to the gravity that is set up in the physics settings multiplied by the "Gravity Multiplier" property under "Simulation". So you can for example make a single rope stop being influenced by gravity by setting the multiplier to 0 for that rope, but you cannot make it fall in a different direction than the gravity of the scene (at the moment). Is this something you would like to have?
No, it should be really straightforward. I can add it to the next version!
Regarding increasing the number of time steps, you can do this in two ways:
a) Decrease the Physics.fixedDeltaTime value: This can potentially have a large effect on the performance, depending on how complex the physics in your scene is in general. It will result in much better interactions between the rigid bodies and the ropes in the scene though!
b) Increase the number of sub-steps of a particular rope: This has very little performance impact as that part of the code is really fast. The downside is that it mostly affects the rope in question only.