There are lots of people who will take your money to read and critique your scripts. Only you can decide if it's worth your cash; if you find an incisive, articulate critic, you might find their comments helpful.

Cheaper would be to find a screenwriters' group in your area. Look for writers' societies or Meetup.com groups.

I'll say again that the Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro is the best bang for the buck. With ten gorillas, you can get the camera and some lenses.

I've seen directors work two ways. One will stand by the camera, but look at the actors; they tend to be the directors who concentrate on performance. The other will stand in Video Village, looking at the monitor; they tend to be the directors who concentrate on visuals.

I still have a pair of Canon XL2 camcorders. They're still perfectly good, and even look fine up-rezzed to 720p. Global shutter, three CCDs, 4:1:1 colour subsampling, etc. give DV a look that's different from today's camcorders, so it might be interesting for the appropriate project. (As Josh R. alluded to above, people have shot movies on their phones.) But there's no denying it's obsolete technology.

Hahaha! -- "blow through two or three pages" in a day. Them's big-budget words! On a micro- or even low-budget indie, you'll shoot more like seven pages a day, to get your 90-page script shot in 12 days.

You can't trust Apple with formats they own! They'll try to cripple Windows-based NLEs, or they'll just abandon it when they get tired of it.