There are various studies in psychology that show that previous experience can be an obstacle to learning new things. I believe that one of the reasons why new users of Tinderbox sometimes (often?) feel disorientated is that they expect the program to work like others they have used in the past. It doesn’t – or at least, it is different enough to require adjustment.
To go to your questions – as far as I know, something has to exist before you can link to it, so no. 2 is not possible.
For no. 3, it doesn’t matter where you create notes, you can move them anywhere you want, whenever you want. You can link them after you have created them.
As you get to know Tinderbox better, you may find yourself questioning whether placing notes in hierarchies is the best way to go. Hierarchies are not very flexible. It may turn out that a better strategy is to use keywords, so when you create a note you add the keyword “band”, which makes it obvious that it belongs in the category of “music” without you having to place it in a hierarchy. But I don’t want to get in too deep here. I’m just trying to say that it seems a lot of people run into trouble when they have a rigid, preconceived idea of how they want to arrange their data. It is often better to lob in the data, then work out how best to arrange it as you go along. One of the strengths of Tinderbox is that it provides tools that allow the database to morph as you get to understand things better.
See this observation from James Fallows: http://forum.eastgate.com/t/user-attributes-or-tags/1069/12?