Looks good. Maybe the gate is the transition point between two worlds and you can play with dualism, yin-yang, all that good stuff. One thing that i would definetly change is the default UE sky.
Just tossing in my way i guess, I usually start at 1 and not 0 (for poses) so 0 is my default (how i started my rig, i.e. the T pose or pose that works for me.)
The red dot is a non-default pivot point, though I can't for the life of me recall which rollout or tab that's under. For your first question, couldn't you just anchor the hand via the keyframing rollout?
Make sure it's focused (select your model and press f) on your target as well as that can affect the sensitivity when you get close. Making a new perspective will have no focus target so will use the default.
The reason the whole mesh appears green is because you are using Alpha blend as your "top" blend layer, and alpha always defaults to a value of one, so it will always pick the highest option, which in this case is green.
you can find it in Lightbox under brushes, move. But what move parts is is a regular move brush with topological masking on, so if you turn on topological masking on your default move brush, it should behave the same.
Would those sharp edges happen to be creased? The crease setting is under Edge selection mode. Select the questionable edges and check the crease value. If it's set to a high value, it will cause the problem you are having. Default is 0.
Yeah, stamp spacing to 0 and steady brush to 0 fixes the problem. I have NO IDEA why they put those retarded values by default, its pretty much the best way to give an horrible impression of the program.
Maya is set to use FWVN by default now I think. Support loops and FWVN give you different visual results. You're missing a loop or 2 in that image though which is probably what you're seeing.
Yeah default settings all around and UAC off. I've confirmed the nv tools 2 exist in the correct folder and all the paths are correct. Running the scrips pops a dox box for half a second and then nothing happens.