Hi Ingot54,
I would like to commend you on your decision to learn VSA. You have raised many questions here(VSA tends to do that to you) and you should seek out the answers or doubt will forever plague your trading.
I'm going to say something that will sound a little pompus but, I mean the best when I say it. I could answer just about all of your questions above but I'm not going to. If I just tell you the answers, you will miss the most important aspect to the answers. All the information your require is out there somewhere but to find i, you must read and learn so much. Without this learning curve, you WILL NOT succeed in VSA.
Learning the VSA language takes a long time and a lot of dedication on your part. You can write off the next 12 months for sure, probably longer. But I can assure you of this, when you can 'read' the charts, you will NEVER look at the charts in the same light again.
There is so much info available for free on the net, forums, pdfs, videos, documents, books etc and you need to read/see it all.
I can offer this as a kind of incentive for you. 18 months ago I knew nothing of VSA. Now I trade VSA successfully in ONLY the forex market. Also, I do it using MT4(demo) and it's inbuilt volume feed(FXCM tho I'm just looking into changing to The collective FX due to repainting issues with FXCM during news events). I use the demo feeds mor the charting and separate platform for live trading. I do not trade full time but, this is due to personal circumstances not trading.
For all those people out there who say volume/ VSA doesn't work in the forex market.......they are simply wrong. In my experience, the people who say this, do not know how to read VSA.......even tho many think they do (I mean no disrespect to anyone).