As far as sets, if you're looking for normal, most people don't do that, they do existing characters like what you already saw. As far as personality variety, there is a point where even the largest packs have to start repeating, so you will run into girls with the same personality. As far as prepared sets, again, most people don't do them in sets, focusing on individual characters instead. I do have a set that is completely original, has a full 98 girls plus variants for the Kplug mod, has as much variety in personalities as I could give it, and I altered voice pitch if I couldn't get an unused personality, and all of them are normal and completely original characters. That said, my girls are not ready for release, they are still very much a work in progress.
F5 for the tutorials, it should be translated, but there has been an issue with that in recent builds.
Not sure what you mean by hurry, if you mean some sort of time limit, no, the only time limit is for how long the day lasts. If you want to get something done on a specific day, then yeah, you should hurry because that timer moves quick, but no reason otherwise. You lose nothing if you don't get something done on a specific day except dates, you'll make your girl angry if you miss a date.
Even with a separate download, you then have to find all the mods that did work on previous builds separately, which can be difficult and sometimes even impossible. The repacks are made specifically for avoiding this, which is why people use them. There are ups and downs to every method and I'm not sure the ups on a separate download outweigh the downs.
Have the game opened in windowed mode, in other words turn off fullscreen in initsetting.exe, have the male maker open, drag a card you want to make male into the game window from the female folder, then edit it. The same applies for making males out of females, just with the male folder and the female maker instead.
BitTorrent is what I use.