First of, welcome to the LE community and great to see you here asking question, there are plenty of people happy to help you and bring you more enjoyment out of this game.
You don’t have to apologize for asking questions, that’s what the forum is here for.
So here some of my thoughts on the various subjects:
In the early/midgame while still being in he campaign i usally look for items that have at least 2 usefull affixes for my build and try to early craft them a bit better, without wasting too much ressources, generally having 1 or 2 high tier affixes is worth more then having 3 or 4 mid-tier affixes, especially for the damage you deal with melee weapons(the pre-fix slots)
So depending on your build you want to watch out for certain affixes.
At the endgame there can drop already very powerful items, but most of the time you need to give them a few crafts to make them god-tier
There is an option to display the full item names (all pre- and suffixes), this will at first might make the loot a little bit less “readable” , but you will soon get used to the affix names and learn their names.
Then you get used to that display of item names you will quickly look at the loot and filter it without needing to hover over every single item.
You will want to loot everything with affixes that are usefull for your build, even if the items is crap, because you can use “Runes of Shattering” on them to destroy the item and gain a few of it’s affixes as craftign shards.
First of all, the defence/mitigation system in this game works ALOT different from PoE.
While the generel statement that defences are very very important still is correct, the way you approach it in LE is very different.
Without going too much into detail, basically Health and Protections are equally strong, because of the damage mitigation formula. You can read the exact formula ingame using the Game Guide(press g and search for protections).
Protections do not give flat out % damage reduction, but instead effective health.
So focusing on stacking health OR protections OR a combination of both is equally good.
BUT, there are several other means of defences in this game, like for example the 2 strongest are “chance to recieve a glancing blow” (50% damage), which works for everything except DoT’s and % Crit Avoidance(which is a chance that a recieved crit becomes a normal hit)
So glancing blow and crit avoiudance affixes are also very rare and needed, search for those, to use runes of shattering as well.
Pretty common way to get glancing blow stat to 100% are the “set” affixes (X% chance for each item with this same affix), which will max it out with 4 or 5 items.
TL:DR Stack Health OR Protections in conjuction with 100% Glancing Blow and 100% Crit Avoidance.