BTC maxi starting to question maximalism

Hello everyone, I have been lurking around for a while and I wanted to ask you a few questions. I'm sorry if a similar post has been made already, but I am really trying to open up my mind and maybe change my perspective. I'm sorry if the post is long! (Just scroll down directly to the questions if you don't care about how I became a maxi)

First of all, I am a computer engineering student and I founded a students' team in my university focusing on blockchain technologies, so don't be afraid to be technical.

The first coins (early 2019) I ever held were a few XLM for an airdrop that I gained for doing a friend's referral program, but I never took that seriously. After that, I downloaded the Brave browser and started earning a few BAT from time to time. I seriously started studying blockchain technology in September 2019 and I learned the cryptography principles and algorithms behind it, the differences between Bitcoin (BTC) and other major cryptocurrencies like ETH, LTC, XRP etc. In March 2020 I started having a lot more free time (guess why) and I founded a students' team along with other colleagues at my uni. All of the founding members who were already into crypto were maxis, so I became one as well by listening to their arguments and to the arguments of our guests (we have many activities and we got to meet different personalities in the cryptoworld, but most people are in the BTC sphere).

I believe that my colleagues had a very big influence in me becoming a maxi, but as I learned more and looked at the technology, I made my first ever BTC purchase only in June 2020 and as time went on I understood that BTC can't - in its current state - be the only blockchain. That's why I bought some DOT and I believe in that technology as well. After having used the LN network, I am starting to think that it can't be the solution for Bitcoin's scalability problem. It is great for small recurring payments, but not for general use as balancing a node is difficult and opening and closing channels is fairly expensive. Also, while my LN wallets are non custodian, I am trusting someone else to manage channels and other operations for me (I personally use Breez if anyone is curious). Then came the big hashrate crash of April 16th (hope I didn't mix up the date). The current onchain fees have been a wake up call for me to the current state of the BTC fee market and on-chain usability. If you have to pay fees way too high or if you have to trust someone else, you're basically ditching Satoshi's original vision of trustless peer-to-peer cash system. I am now looking towards BCH.

I am sorry if this is long, but now here are my doubts/questions:
- How many transactions can BCH settle in every block? Shouldn't it be around 8 times more than BTC?
- Why did BCH decide not to use SegWit? SegWit allows for reducing the size of a transaction, so it should be something that can be useful for BCH as well, even if not a priority.
- Is taproot being considered for BCH?
- Why does BCH not have rbf? I understand that at the moment there is no need for it, but it could be a nice feature to have in the future.
- Why do people say that with BCH you can also accept a transaction with no confirmations? Especially for big amounts, shouldn't you always wait at least 4?
- How can BCH compete against BTC as a store of value? In my opinion, BTC will be the dominant crypto as store of value because of both its scarcity and high fees. Right now the only flow I see with BTC are, again, the fees, in the sense that some UTXOs that today have a certain amount of sats in the future will basically be stuck because of the higher fees.
- The main argument for higher fees in the BTC network is security. When I pay BTC transaction fees, I am paying for more security as well. Do you believe this is a fair argument? (I know that the security lies not in the technology, but in the mining network).
- Let's say that tomorrow BTC disappears and all BTC transaction become BCH, so the BCH network will have a lot more transactions to process and a bigger mining network (as all BTC miners become BCH miners). Wouldn't BCH fees rise as well and be closer to 1/8 of current BTC's fees?
- I saw that BCH has second layer solutions for smart contracts; are there any useful applications for it that I can have a look at?
- I entered the cryptoworld only after the BTC/BCH hard fork and basically the only side that I ever had access to was the BTC side of the story. Whenever I lurk in this sub, I see that people complain about Blockstream and other major companies about why the fork was necessary. Could you provide me with unbiased sources about that discussion? I am also ok with sources biased towards BCH, as I have only ever had access to sources biased towards BTC.
- How is BCH development going on? For BTC, I know of LN, Liquid, RGB and many others, for BCH I really don't know where to start (except maybe for the different wallets and different nodes implementations)
- How does BCH's privacy compare to BTC's? My gut says that they should be similar and that any solution used by BTC (like coinjoin or mixing) could be implemented by BCH and vice versa.
- Are there any solutions being considered to reduce the storage required for running a BCH node? While I agree that, especially long term, the bandwith will not be a problem, I believe that the storage might, especially considering that we are approaching the end of Moore's law.
- I know of many services that allow you to spend your BTC, could you recommend a few for BCH? I know that on bitcoin.com there is a marketplace, but I am really looking into services like Bitrefill or big companies like Tesla.
- Do you recommend any personalities or sources to follow if I would like to know more about BCH news?
- Do you have any further suggestions or arguments that might change my view or just things I should now?

These are all of my main questions and I thank you for any answer you might give. I am sorry if I wrote a lot, but I felt like explaining my situation would help you answer my questions and I prefer making one big post with all of them instead of multiple.

Thank you all for your time.

Edit: Thanks for the awards and thanks everyone for the answers. You all gave me explainations, ideas and definitely changed my perspective. I will keep learning and experimenting. Thank you all for your time.