The bow sound is pretty "light" or "wimpy", I agree. Then again, it never gets annoying because you hardly notice it. It's pretty much the same as in DD I think.
I play on Xbox 360 and have experienced almost no stuttering. Also, empty containers state (Empty) when I glance over them. Perhaps you can tweak your PC settings to get the most out of it?
About the stuttering, there's no more tweaking i can make, i've tried everything from forcing V-sync on the CCC, up to testing various AA and AF modes, changing all in-game options, etc. From more searching on theses forums i think its a common thing on the PC version, most waiting on a patch to fix it.
The containers here also state when they are empty

but the somewhat anoying tracking method of moving your character until he gets in a good position to target the next container is very lame and timeconsuming. I dont like to have to precision move my character in order to get to the next container. FOr example, when there's 5 containers next to each other, we have to move to target each one and if we get 4 empty ones, sometimes we keep targeting the one we already checked, its very anoying, i rather destroy them all!
