Glad to hear it.
Good questions, it looks like there are settings in the material to change the Translucency Pass to ‘After Motion Blur’ and also a setting in the material to ‘Output Depth and Velocity’
The thread also mentions that disabling motion blur on a per-object basis is not possible.
I’m not sure about questions 2 and 3. My first thought would be to try and get a different/clearer view using View Modes - also this tutorial is a good place to get started learning about the rendering pipeline.
Maybe those artifacts are tied to framerate? You can use the console command ‘stat fps’ to see your framerate, and then t.maxfps to cap it. Also slomo <1 is normal but you can slow the game down or speed it up with this number>