Well The best solution I came up with for Issue #1 was to ghost cli uninstall and reinstall. This will be a big issue when the site has data on it as this workaround removes everything.
My concern is that users see who authored/published the article then try to login as that person and lock the admin out of the site. The password has to be changed/reset via e-mail which is not viable in my situation.
Issue #2 there was a neat workaround posted here. It looks promising but again I keep messing up the JSON formatting and it doesn’t quite work -UPDATE- I was not changing the date. The date must be close to the current time or you get an error. This user creation process works perfectly! Thanks @badrihippo
Issue #3 No progress yet.
I’ll update this if I get any better answers.
Thanks