I don't have time to get to all your questions, but I'll touch on a couple that caught me eye.
Robot builder is a program created by WPILib to quickly create the basic structure with a lot of the objects instantiated for you. It's distributed with WPILib. Look in the Windriver folder. We've used it for a couple years and really like it.
I'm not sure if we are a "good" C++ team. We only have one professional programmer on the team, and he isn't always deeply involved with the robot code. We use him to figure out all the other difficult stuff (thanks Aaron). We have used C++ sine 2009, and you can see several of our examples including one command based robot on our GitHub site here:
https://github.com/FRCTeam16/