What doesn't "work" with 'xdir','reverse'?
Not sure about the baseline
Can fix 3) --
set('ztick',[])
One for three ain't bad... :)
ADDENDUM
waterfall is an m-file, however, so you can see what it's doing internally (and it's not at all that long, either).
I see something interesting in the comments beginning with
% Add 2 data points to the beginning and three data points at the end
% of each row for a patch. ...
There might be somewhere you can play, I don't know. That it is a series of patches makes one wonder if can get rid of the baseline, however; might have to revert to trying to build a series of line plots.
