Fun questions! My takes:

1) Sadly there isn't really. There are a few good blogs like Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" that centralize news, but no anonymous online forum like this.

2) Google scholar alerts, Twitter, Bluesky, and word of mouth.

3) I think our understanding of biological processes at the mesoscale is about to hit an inflection point, largely through advances in electron microscopy (cryo-ET) and the ability to perform simulations at this scale.

4) Not harder but definitely more messy and progress is less linear.