Yeah, we've gotten a lot of feedback about this. This is something we had to do for time constraints, and which I hope we can fix soon.
The memory tag work around is good. The fact that it is "string only" is just an unfortunate side effect of the value editor. If you need non-string tags like this, you can create an expression tag, and have its expression be a reference to the parameter (you don't get the handy popup menu, but it will work with the standard "{param}" syntax). However, there is a trick: you need to imagine what it's doing behind the scenes: swapping the param value before then compiling it as an expression. So, you have to make sure it's a valid expression after the swap. For numbers, this is easy. For strings though, you have to do something a little unintuitive and wrap it in quotes, like:
"{MyStrParam}"Anyhow, hopefully we'll eliminate the need for these workarounds soon.
Regards,