Regarding 1) above - while I love the intent there is a practical matter involved. Since all NMF are automatically accepted, it saves the staff doing the selecting a bit of time if you skip writing the essay. My hunch is that once they determine, through whatever means, that they are reading an NMF ‘essay’ they move on.
The only thing we did not like about the NMF floor was the fact that it was the 10th floor…for move-in day it meant a lot of stairs…had I known I may have started ‘training’ for the move-in sooner (no pun intended).