No, on both counts! Because you'll find as time goes on, progressively modeling objects of ever increasing complexity will require ngons or n-poles or triangles for certain situations where they're unavoidable not too which is really an efficient process in maintaining an effective edgeflow, that usually mitigates shading…
You can't control how things are triangulated in maya without actually connecting those edges. In this case I would probably connect them as tri to form the point of the spike correctly, because at export to game you don't really get a choice to lock in the tri direction any other way, and you might get those edges being…