"I may want to place the same design in a sheet at 1:500, 1:100, 1:50, 1:10. Does AS alow for this?"
KInd of the whole point of AS it to allow this sort of thing. If done properly that shouldn't be a problem.
That said there are a number of settings you need to keep an eye on to make sure it does work properly.
I used to avoid AS like the plague. Finally I decide to give another try and found if you uses it 100% of the time (including using in dimension styles) it works pretty well. I found most of my issues came from using a mix of AS text and standard text. Once I established set of styles and used them exclusively everything worked pretty smoothly.
Only issue I still have is copying text in from a reference file (at a different scale) can get bizarre sometimes. Also editing references files via activate can also give me some problems.