Actor or Component to extend functionality

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hello, I’m currently in the proccess of making a component which handles certain interactions with the world. This component is meant to be attached to some static actors.
The component has some behaviour triggered by the BeginPlay event; and I realized that it doesn’t update in the editor (visually); so I went ahead and tried to put said behaviour in the Construction Script only to find out that there isn’t one. A quick search taught me that components don’t have construction scripts, which is quite unconvienient.
This raised a couple questions:

  1. Should I use a Component-based BluePrint for this extended functionality; or just extend AActor and append one actor to another? What variables should affect this decision?
    In this case the component per-se doesn’t have a visual effect, but changes the material of the base actor (via Dynamic Material Instances) and must react to certain actions (raycasts) against its parent actor.

  2. When Construction Script is available, should per-instance load logic be there, or at the BeginPlay event? What are the differences between both? (Aside from Construction Script affecting the Editor)

Thanks in advance.