Deprecated - Usability feedback

Hello

Just some quick impressions on my first experiences with Drupal, atm I rather sit and type something than look at another line of code.

My background: some programming experiences in basic, pascal, c, cobol & c#.net. DBs: dBase3+, IDBMS & SQLServer 2000. No experience in building websites (other than a bit html), fairly new to CSS, completely new to PHP, CMS.
Started a blog a while ago on Blogger/Blogspot and found it's time to move on to something more serious. Had a look at WordPress and similar, CMSs too and decided on Drupal because I saw some use for the Taxonomy thing.
Objective is to build "the blog of my dreams".
I'm on a Windows pro pc, using Firefox 1.5 and Dreamweaver MX 2004.

I started with a look into Drupal. Downloaded the XAMPP packages and Drupal v4.7.2. Feel free to have a good laugh: after D/L the Drupal package I concluded that with half a meg it must be an update script, I was expecting a CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (capitals intended) and all I got was a bunch of scripts... D/L v4.7.0 too and slowly it dawned on me that this, in fact, was the CMS...
XAMPP installed like a dream! Plug & Play! Wanted to run Drupal on loacalhost, got it to work with a bit of fiddling. Didn't go very smooth but I got it to work faster than anticipated, all in all it took me perhaps an hour to sort the problems out (database and permissions issues mainly).

Next I looked at the admin page, overwhelmed by all the options but that's what I choose a CMS for in the first place. Smart thing: at this point already I realized my limitations and ordered "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites" by David Mercer. Meaning I have more faith in Drupal than in myself and a few days down the road I already wish I didn't order it but went to pick the book up myself. The docs and forums on this site contain a lot of words but few workable solutions. Problems are dealt with on various places meaning I usually have multiple tabs open and get completely lost. Perhaps this is the motherlode for the experienced Drupal user but for the n00b it's a nightmare. I'll invest in PHP/CSS/XHTML literature too.

Just used the install video from Lullabot to install Drupal for the first time. I had looked at Drupal previously, but not having had any PHP experience had not been able to install it. The video was fantastic, and I now have a successful Drupal installation up and running. And I must say I am very impressed. The modules are so fabulously flexible, the possibilities seem endless.

In general, does Ajax and JS applications slow a site, or actually increase performance? It seems for years, all things JS were evil and developers often were the "in the know" folks who blocked all scripts on their browsers. Now, everything Google builds uses it heavily, so I'm wondering if it is really an improvement.

Is $node an array?

Where do I find information about variables?

I have two problems with my drupal installation: -

1. I used to be able to get new users to get their passwords immediately when they sign up, for some reason, this is now not possible. To the best of my knowledge I didnt mess with anything related to those settings. If I did, could someone please point me to where I can set it so? I searched around for something I might have switched off but couldn't find anything liek that.

I am currently using the upload module installed with Drupal. I have tried using a number of the photo upload scripts with varying results.

The current module works great for my goals. The only things I would add:

1. Able to upload to specificied locations (e.g. /files/photos1/)

2. Able to create new (sub-) folders in /files/ on the fly (e.g. /files/photos1/todays_date/)

3. Mass uploads not tied to a node; e.g. I want to upload 10 pictures at once to /files/recentpictures/

And only loosely related...