Hey. That's quite a nicely loaded device you've got there. Latest OS and lots of modules licensed. Note with v11 you don't need a crossover cable as it supports auto MDI/MDX. To the other questions;
1) It was overly complex and very hard to configure. I believe the Device Service Clustering feature provides the same kind of functionality but with less complexity and greater scalability.
2) Yes and no, you can capture packets directly on the device using tcpdump, ssldump and other tools but you might have a reason to want to copy them to an IDS or some other monitoring system.
3) I'll get back to you.