there's a lot of variety out there. you can spend your entire ticket dorking out on digital modes (esp if you go for general+ and have access to lower bands) like FT8, FT4, Olivia, WSPR [0] to see how far out you can get on as little power as possible and so on.
Or if you want to ease into it, you can get a ham radio w/o a license, or cheap SDR and try to receive and decode weather sats, etc [1]
making tiny WSPR boards and things like APRS [2] interest me more than ragchewing or nets on 40 or 80 meters most of the time
forgot my favorite, amateur SSTV (analog baby!) - can see some analog and hybrid (easylink over internet.. cheating) http://www.g0hwc.com/
well.. if you dont want to, you can download tribes1 archives preconfigured and ready to go on modern machines https://playt1.com/ (click on one of the configs)
yea this is ridiculous, they have lied through their teeth about what happens on Android. tho of course its probably half clueless negligence or a missed change, half not caring. all the same
yes ive done this recently with both spi and i2c. it works with modules, the hardest part for me was finding the right way to create the device tree so eg, my module got the spi bus over spidev. same with i2cdev if you are not using userspace
that I couldn't tell you. I'd personally pick lua (or damn near anything else) first. maybe just entrenched knowledge/tooling in certain industries monster codebases.
once you recognize it, you may start to catch it in use in applications all over the place. if you ever use xilinx tools, ECAD, etc, you will see reams of tcl handling builds and project definitions