In general, if you are writing about information that is commonly available on many websites, then that information can be considered to be "common industry knowledge" - and most authors would not use citations.   Facts that would likely be in the body content of an introductory college textbook would also be considered as "common industry knowledge".

However, if you are stating specific information that might only be available from one or a few sources, then a citation is a proper thing to do.  Also, if you are giving facts or advice that you feel it is important to give others credit or responsibility, citations are good there too.

The above is what I generally do for writing content for a specific industry.  I also tend to use more citations where parts of my writing approach the limits of my firmly confident knowledge.

You are obviously doing research and visiting sites that you think would be superior to your own.  What is their practice on citations?  That might be a guide for you too.

I don't believe that it "hurts" to put up a temporary site.  However, if it subtracts from your time of getting your real site up then that is a sacrifice.

I would rather put up the first few pages of my real site a day or two early than get a temporary site up a week before.

The only exception is that I would want something up ASAP if I knew that important people were looking for me.

I can't figure out if they are really that ignorant of the rules or if they are just lying.

Probably both!  And, they say anything that makes the best story to gain a client, hold a client or make themselves look innocent when things go wrong.

**We have competitors who are using very shady SEO tactics and winning with them. **

I think that it is more Google being slow to identify problems and conservative about what they penalize.  When SEOs go into the manuipulative zone they are taking their chances that Google will not find them or penalize them.   SEOs who do this often do not fully inform the client that risks are being taken and that they could be slapped with a penalty that will permanently ban them from google, or in the case of Penguin, have their site demoted in the SERPs for nearly two years.

Robots directives and rel=canonical can be assigned by .htaccess.  This is a very handy way to assign noindex or rel=canonical to .pdf documents, print formats, video transcripts, etc.  You can also use it to apply noindex or rel=canonical at scale.   Two  Moz articles (of several) that describe these are....

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

https://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos

Google is really smart about manipulation. They have teams of PhD engineers looking out for it and racks of servers watching for it.  These guys are so into it that they don't go home at night.  And, the guys who offer these clicking services are not very smart.  If they were smart they would be making big bucks in cushy jobs like Google Engineer and riding hoverboards around their offices.   The intersection between really smart people and really dumb people isn't a good place to get involved.

I'd really like to see keyword tracking available for subfolders.  How many of our efforts are based around product lines, articles in a topic niche, articles of a single author.

A couple of decades ago, I burned out multiple computers running a log analysis  program named ClickTracks because it tracked the performance of my folders, but the program was costly and became unsupported and when your last computer died that could run it, your ability to use it was gone for good.

Continuity plans often contain information that remains private until needed.

I understand with a 301 redirect, the final URL would have lost about 15% of the link juice.

It used to be that 301 redirects resulted in a loss of linkjuice.  That is no longer true, as stated by John Mueller of Google, and Gary Illyes.  https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

However - if after some time (e.g. 2 months, or 1 year) I remove the redirection - is the original page going to have any SEO juice, or did it already lose all of it?

ALL of my 301 redirects will still in place when I am dead.  My continuity plan passed on to my heirs tells them that they better keep all of the 301s in place or face a possible substantial loss of income.  If you remove the 301 you have no guarantee that linkjuice will still fllow.... but you do have a guarantee that any human who clicks that link will find air.

In your situation...  with these URLs being previously redirected... I would simply remove the redirect and use the current page.  It might take Google a long time to reindex them unless you submit each of them for indexing.   I would try that with a few and see if Google accepts them, indexes them and returns them to a reasonable ranking.