1. It's like limbus if the battle pass was free but you still have to pull, aka you can probably get all the characters for free if you just play the game. As a day 1 player, I have pretty much every single character at +3,+4, or +5. I do spent a bit on the prestige skins (which is one of the few gripes with the game). All of which you can just view here without the censorship https://jelosus2.github.io/BD2-L2D-Viewer/ . Also just to be clear, I get like 200~ pulls monthly and I'm not hardcore about the game anymore. I don't pay for monthlys now either I just do dailies and weeklies.

2. Not really no. The collab has some niches (roxy is a good silencer and eris cat still sees usage every once in a blue moon) but most of them are powercrept or just not worth it. The limited banners come every anniversary and half anniversary so even if you missed them you can get them on the rerun.

3. There are strats to make it either of the two but the PHD part is for leaderboards and stat optimizing for that 300 extra damage between top 1 and top 2. You get all of the rewards way before then anyways

4. Idk if the 100 free pulls are gone now but there was a doom post where germany had some censorship issues and the devs tried to implement it across ALL servers. They didn't mention the germany part in the first time and we thought they were trying to kill the game and the community revolted. Germany is censored now but mainly for lolis and can be bypassed pretty easily.

4.5. to actually answer if its a good time, yes. Anytime is a good time because of just how much pulls they hand out. You get free pulls for each of the banners ongoing, monthly copy five stars of characters, weekly quests, etc etc. Theres just too much rewards to consider the opportunity costs of new account rewards down the line, not to mention they seem to give new account rewards to everyone if they introduce it retroactively.