Potential new player with some questions

I'm an old hat middle tier player who played ******** for most of high school and recently came back to the game on the invictius shard. While I love many aspects of it, the pop is rather low and I keep hearing that this shard still has a good population and retains the spirit of the old ******** community. I do have a few questions though:

1. How fast is skill gain compared to old school osi?
2. Are runebooks blessed by default?
3. Are there still housing spots available (no need for an 18x18 but would prefer not a small marble tower either).
4. What's the community like and how easy is it to find a guild?
5. If one were so inclined, could one donate to get settled with regs, a house, and some basic gear? If so, what is the going rate for like a 13x13, 14x14, and 15x15 and what's the value of donation coin in terms of gold?
6. How easy is it to find a guild and get into champ spawns and the like?
7. What clients and assist programs are allowed for targeting, macros, and the like. Do you all allow salos, razor, etc?

Heya, I can answer a few of these for you.

1. Faster, for sure. Most skills are quick and easy to level, with the notable exception being Animal Taming. You can macro almost every other skill in no time.
2. Yes
3. Yes, small houses are available to place, even some decently sized 11x plots etc come up.
4. Community is diverse. There are always guilds recruiting for sure.
5. Donations can be found on the main website. The current conversion rate is roughly 200k gold per 1k dono. For housing prices, I'd recommend joining discord. They can vary wildly. I see a 15x13 for 275k, and a 13x18 for 2.5m. It all depends on location. You can find max storage houses for quite cheap, though.
6. Another thing discord would be great for. There are always guilds out there looking for more.
7. The downloader will give you a few options. Our own client, which is based on CUO (Classic UO), the forever client. You can also use Classic UO, Steam, Salos, Orion. The forever client or CUO give you the options of running Razor, or Razor Enhanced.