First brew - Equipment selection

Al Capone Jr FTW, although you need a shortening of that name for folks whose typing sucks. ACj? Too much to read, but let's see if I can weigh in on the last questions.
General: I started inside and now it is a mostly outside with mash/bottling taking place inside. Bayou burner outside made my brewing day so much easier (yeah, propane). Do get a bigger boil pot.
Rack: I'm fine with my bottling tree. $17 bucks or so and it holds bombers well.
Bottiling1: Drink a few bombers, or more than a few and clean well. If you stick to bottling for awhile as I have bombers and growlers do not quite make up for a kegging system, but they ease the pain a lot. 12 ozers get old really fast.
Bottling 2: Until I get wildly famous for my excellent home brews (cough), plastic buckets work fine for me. Ferment in your primary, transfer to you secondary that has a spigot. Attach a plastic tube to the spigot that is long enough to go to the bottom of the bottle. Open spigot and fill bottle. You can go much fancier, but you should get quickly good at judging when to turn the spigot off. Have some towels handy. No one who will get free beer from you is going to care if the fill level is a bit high or low. If they do, cut them off.

 

Mostly higher abv beers, but its usually a safe idea to use them in general. Sometimes the krausen will clog your regular airlock and the pressure will build, till it shoots out of your carboy like a rocket. Making quite the mess in the process. Its better than cleaning beer off your ceiling.

 

You can probably get everything you want in the Northern Brewer deluxe starter kit, plus and
an extra carboy, immersion chiller and a 7.5 gal kettle for around $350. Throw in a nice thermometer and the kit needed for yeast starters and you have enough to make great beer for just over $400. Don't overthink it if you don't need to, save that stress for when you start brewing!

 

It's not a matter of rushing per se - but taking time to cool serves zero benefit. You want to get your wort to pitching temp and covered as fast as you can. Reason B is that heating and cooling wort aren't the fun parts.

Wasn't trying to thread jack in that second post totally. It's something that you might want to be aware of as well, depending on your living situation. A lot of homebrewers live in apartments with limited/no basement space or accessibility. With closet space at a premium as well, I thought it could serve the new brewer community at large to get an answer on that. Threads like this come up all the time, and one should probably get pinned. If one does, I think that's a valid question to have in it.