undercoveryankee

I've been trying to build a probe that lands uncontrolled, then extends an antenna once it's on the ground to receive further commands. These will help a lot.

Here's a mission report that mentions getting "grassland" results after a splashdown. I suspect that "splashed" results for grassland are a separate category, just like "landed" results for water. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/64897-Reconstruction-a-0-23-career-mode-story?p=928044&viewfull=1#post928044

My guess: The biome map doesn't line up perfectly with the terrain, so there are places where you can land near the water, register as "landed" as opposed to "splashed", but be in the water biome. I seem to recall this happening for me near the island airfield.

MechJeb's RCS balancer has a setting to use RCS for translation only. That's something like what you're looking for.

Remotetech and whatever plugin you were using for programming would have to know a lot about each other's internals to make this happen. Until then, my favorite way to do probe maneuvers is to create a node with MechJeb, then hit "execute" on Remotetech's flight computer.