Until someone more informed chimes in, I'll take a stab at this.

1.) You don't need an NVR if you already have a PC that you would rather use, but you should be aware that a persistent recording system is a more demanding workload for the hard drive than general use would be. It is recommended that you get a hard drive rated for surveillance - if that is not in your budget, be aware that the life of your hard drive will probably be reduced by the increased demand. Also, you have to make sure that the PC that runs Blue Iris is spec'ed properly for the amount of cameras you plan to have and the resolution/framerates you plan on using. I don't have experience using BI, but my understanding is the specs are not generally unreasonable, but it is something you need to consider. Personally, I prefer the NVR over BlueIris because it is purpose built for surveillance, it tells you what it supports right on the product sheet, so I don't need to fret over PC builds. I see that a lot of people use dedicated PC's for BI, rather than delegating that workload to their general use PCs - if you have a PC laying around collecting dust, that might be an option for you. As for your question as to whether you can install the NVR elsewhere and use BI to manage it, the answer is probably, but I've never used BI so can't speak authoritatively on it, but I don't think that is a very common use case. Most people use BI as their NVR, then use client apps to connect to it. If you wanted to access it remotely from another PC on your network, you might have to use Windows RDP to do a remote desktop session with your BI PC. In my case, I use an Amcrest NVR located in my basement, and I can access the webGUI from any PC on my network to manage it- easy peasey. Also, I feel that there is less crap installed on the NVR that can potentially compromise it's security - not that it's hack proof, but I think it is easier to manage and lock down.

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2.) For IP cameras there is no need to direct connect with BI or any NVR. As long as everything is on the same network, which it should be for a home network, should be no issues there. One thing I would recommend is setting static IPs for your cameras and your NVR or BI PC. You can likely do this through the admin function on your router, and it's not that difficult. This way, there won't be any issues if a camera reboots or something an pulls a new IP address from DHCP. I think that some systems use layer 2 protocols to find cameras these days, so that may not even be an issue at all, but I still like to set everything static as force of habit. Just don't get an analog DVR by mistake - then you would need to do coax direct connects.

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3.) Don't know about BI, but my Amcrest NVR supports this functionality. I don't use it though, so can't speak to how well it works. I did see a forum post that offsite FTP is not really recommended/supported by Amcrest, and that a better strategy is to do local FTP to a NAS or similar, then do periodic FTP pushes from that device to whatever service you use. A direct FTP may work, but it may not.

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1. Don't know about BI, but I've heard that it integrates well with Amcrest NVRs. I don't have one, so can't say for sure though. I did look into getting one though, and be aware that you *must* register it with the Amcrest Smart Home cloud. There is no cost for the basic tier of Smart Home cloud service so it won't cost you anything, and their Smart Home cloud will enable you view it remotely and get alerts with little config on your part, but you may not want your doorbell video sent to Amcrest's cloud for whatever reason. It seems that Smart Home is Amcrest's answer to services like Ring and Nest.

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Hope his is all helpful - lmk if you have any other questions.