Ok, I didn't notice the original script was for transmission - it is more outdated than the band structure version because nxplot was deprecated already in Matplotlib 1.3. So, more work to update it. But my main problem is actually that I have no good data to test the plot with, I deleted all old "nc" files a long time ago.
Thus, I made a blind attempt to apply the same changes as for band structure - maybe it works, but if not perhaps you can provide me a test HDF5 file with transmission data to experiment on?
The reason for the strange plot is that you have computed a usual band structure, from G to K to M etc. For this plot you need to get eigenvalues on a regular k-point mesh around the K point (or in the whole zone). The transmission spectrum already has such data, though. I have attached also a script to generate the input data for the band structure plot.
For the other questions, that is outside my expertise, but I understand you are saying the scripts in the tutorial do not work anymore? That should be considered a "bug" and I can report it to have it fixed.