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I like this answer because it is the route I want to go, however is there any documented resources stating that there is no penalty or issues with this approach?

Personally, I think the second option (no pipe) would look more natural to the engines, but would also be less descriptive to the users.

Also, does it matter if what is after the pipe is the domain name or not?  I know that's fairly common practice, but I do not want to use the domain name there.

From GWMT Blog - There's no need to mark page 2 to n of the series with noindex unless you're sure that you don't want those pages to appear in search results.

Regarding the page titles - the rel="next & rel="prev" do not solve the duplicate title issue, so you would need to alter the tiles on the subsequent pages.  I would just make the page titles unique by adding something like this after the current title (assuming you were on page 2):  ' Page 2' or ' Page 2 or 50'.

Looks good!