For the rest of your questions most of the times it’s actually not a problem with UE but with your approach. It gets a while to get the hang of where all the options affecting the pawn and VR template are but after that you’re done. If you want the VR pawn from VR template you need to migrate it together with it’s blueprints (basically migrate those 2 folders there) and then you put the “Motion Controller Pawn” into the level and you set it to posses player 0. Next you want to export input in project settings from the VR template and put it into your own project. Also note that teleportation won’t really work without navmesh.
Hi, you basically need to bake lighting for those contact shadows. Or you can attempt to fake it with larger radius AO but it’s not going to look as good and not good for VR.