I think the risk of losing data naturally leads to people seeking out the most robust storage solution possible when 90% of those people would probably be better off with something simpler with less that can go wrong.

I can’t answer each bullet (and a couple are dependant on other things like drive speed, activity, and network throughput) but I’ve been using shucked external HDDs for over a decade and would recommend it. I used to use OpenMediaVault running in a VM on Proxmox and briefly tried TrueNAS, but I’ve since migrated all of my VMs to LXCs, so now I just have the drives mounted on the Proxmox host directly combined with mergerfs (not managed by Proxmox’s storage pools) and I pass it through to a Turnkey Linux file server LXC via bind mounts to share over SMB/NFS. Less overhead and LXCs can share CPU/memory dynamically while VMs can’t.

You should be able to replace that /mnt/external directory with no issues as long as the structure is the same within.

I’m playing through Morrowind for the first time right now (past a few hours in at least), and I’ve been blown away at just how much more interesting of a plot and setting it has compared to everything Bethesda ever made after it. The miss chance, spell fail chance, and non-regenerating magicka were always enough to scare me away before, but I finally understood what a huge impact fatigue has on everything, and how much more terrible you are at low-level skills compared to their later games.

I also like the progression of my character walking around slow as shit at level 1 taking forever to get anywhere vs running around at 30mph jumping from canton to canton in Vivec like it’s nothing now.