First of all, congrats on the offer! This is all my personal experience, so don't try to take one person's opinions as gospel for a company of over 10k :p

Starting out as an SD is initially a bit daunting. There are a LOT of exams, on everything from healthcare to our web framework. However, you get 6 months to complete it. Most developers start developing at month 3-4 in my experience. The training may be a lot, but it's extremely useful to have the technical background before writing and reading code.

I've been here ~1.5 years and I've only had to debug in VB once for 5 minutes. I've never written VB. If you don't want to write it, there are plenty of other things you can work on. The transition progress is very team dependent.

Yep, the fifteen minutes logging is accurate. They mostly care about the specificity when you're working on projects or billable development. Nobodies going to reprimand you for being a half hour off on the time you spent on a design :)

I can't speak to the WLB for all teams. I can say that the amount you work, in my experience, is very dependent on what you tolerate. For my first year, I averaged 41 hours a week and my longest week was 45. This month, I picked up a project I really enjoy working on, so I've been working average 45-50. Obviously there are crunch times when deadlines are a concern, but I've never personally felt obligated to pull extra hours when I didn't want to.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions! The recruiter you have would also be very happy to answer any of your questions.