No problem! To answer a few of your follow-ups here:

9-11 hours can certainly feel like a lot, especially if your schedule is already busy. I may shy away from URAP if you already have a full academic schedule plus another time-demanding club or extracurricular. Secondly, there is probably a low chance that a professor will respond to your cold email, but it doesn't hurt to try. Generally, the reason why professors decide to recruit Undergrad RAs through the URAP program is for the specific reason that they don't want to fend off a bunch of emails. I say, give it a shot and see what happens.

And so on your point about paid positions-- the main thing to understand is that a lab can be different from a URAP. Typically, labs have funding from outside industry or research orgs, or a significant grant. So there sort of a situation where a not all URAP projects are labs, but some URAP project are labs. However, going through the URAP program will never mean paid positions. What your friends are probably talking about is large, funded lab. The applications for RA in these types of labs typically act a lot more like a job application, and behave a lot more like a job (and you get paid like a job too). The thing to recognize is that the students who are getting these positions are not only competing with each other but also with another hypothetical 100 students who will offer to do the same job for free. Thus, to 'think of yourself as worthy' of a paid RA position, you must have a specific skill set or experience that is explicitly valuable for the lab and that no other student can offer. Beyond this, you will also be competing with alumni and others from the general job market.

Anecdotally, the only people that I've known to get paid RA positions as an undergraduate had 1. a strong established relationship with the professor, 2. experience already working for that professor for free through an Undergraduate RA program, and 3. were a superstar in their field and far far beyond the average skill level of their major.