1) You don't need to plan around symbiotic soil life:plant relationships to be able to maintain healthy plants. While some engage in practices purposely aimed at feeding and thus multiplying soil life populations, I prefer practices that don't contribute significantly to their numbers, the reason being the greater the density of soil life munching on the hydrocarbon chains that make up the soil particles, the faster those particles break down. The key to a healthy soil is the relationship between how much air and water a soil will hold - especially at container capacity (when the soil is saturated). You can work around a soil that holds lower volumes of water by watering a little more frequently, but it is very difficult to work around the negative influences of soils that hold too much water.

Many people claim that they work around this by adding 'some bark and perlite' to a peat-based commercial soil and have no drainage problems. But you only need to look at the pudding:perlite example cited to see that indeed these problems do not disappear. They are still there because compaction and a high PWT are still there. When you have a high PWT, you are killing off some fraction of roots every time the soil is saturated. The lower the PWT, the fewer the number of roots killed and the greater the potential for healthier plants.

Some growers don't want to admit that certain practices are not conducive to maximizing root health and ensure lost potential, but we can point to sound reasoning and physical science to show that PWTs limit potential. It doesn't always have to be that we are not willing to deal with the issue of a PWT by building soils that limit their presence to something nearly nonexistant; sometimes we are actually unable to deal with decreased watering intervals because of our schedules or priorities. In either case though, there is no difference in the limiting influence of heavy soils based on the difference between unwilling and unable. It just is what it is and should be recognized like something as simply as 'if you don't wash your car, it's not going to shine,.

2) I think you need to understand that you don't need a large organic fraction to support enough bacteria for mineralization of fertilizer. As long as there is a food source and air, bacteria will break down the fertilizers into usable form, The problem comes in the form of the idea that populations of these soil organisms are erratic in containers, and can't always be relied upon to be there in sufficient numbers when needed. 'Slow release' can either mean 'marginally soluble in water' or they require nitrification/mineralization to be broken down into elemental forms to be available.

3) You understand correctly.

4) It won't work because you're changing the gravitational flow potential by (in effect) using the wick to increase the depth of the soil column.

5) Lots of reasons - habit, convenience, cost, that idea carried over from the garden that a large organic component is required if a soil is to be considered 'healthy', perlite gets kind of ugly in a pot and a few plants react poorly to its fluoride content when it's the primary fraction of a medium, or IS the medium. I've started many, many cuttings in pure perlite & kept them in the same for a year or even two with no difficulty other than that they might have become root bound.

6) It depends on a number of variables.

Al