Hey Kevin,
Wow! Good luck! I see you’ve been thinking about this a lot. Lot’s of good questions here. Unlike the typical e-mail thread, each thread in support forums is intended to address a single question, issue, or problem. One that hopefully has some commonality. At least that’s the theory. That allows other users to FIND things and ask further questions about the same topic. More importantly, I can find things and answer the questions once for all.
I am happy to help you with some of this, but what you have here is really an e-mail thread. Your challenges are far from yours alone. I have addressed a number of this issues in my consulting work for customers with similar websites.
So I’m going to close this thread while inviting you to email me (mark@shoalsummitsolutions.com) and perhaps we can get started on some of this.
Regards,
-Mark