Mining questions,fears and problems

Well I dont discuss only one issue in this topic but I think its better not to spam with 3 different topics since all of what I am about to type have a common root..

1st I am a very new miner.. actually the only thing I have done so far is to download the original bitcoin wallet create an address to receive money then I downloaded GUIminer I registered an account to slush's pool made a worker and bind the address (not manually I copyied the string from my wallet and pasted it there) had it mine for one day and some hours..

The result is that until now (and while my bitcoin wallet was fully sychronized it download lots of GB..) i have 0.000000 bitcoins.. on the "my account" link of the slush's pool webpage I seemed to have rewards of 0.000198566 something at the end of the day (yesterday) today I see again nothing in my wallet and on the my account link of sluch;s website I see now a much smaller number... like 0.000000450... I supposed that they just deducted my reward and send it to my wallet and this was the extra bicoin change that I accumolated for the hours I mined today... but it seems not to be the case... why is that (on the status tab of the GUI miner I have just 2 stales all the other calculations were accepted...)

2nd Is it mantatory to choose from a pool? and how to decide which pool to choose?

3rd I see that EVERY asics manufactuer (atleast everyone of the dozens I searched) has only pre-order options for their high end machines.. and even the available ones (that you can directly order without the need of pre-ordering them) -as far as I have been told from friends- are shipped like months after the purchases if shipped at all (I have a friend who purchased an already in stock jalapeno 4.5 GH/s miner on march and he is still on a big quee having as a result when and if he gets the product at early 2014 he supposes because of difficulty this machine wont even pay its electricity bills so practically he lost his 250$ that he payied for ordering this product...

4th and here I come with my fear.. Why all of these mining machine manufactuers having such delays while having so big demand? its not one case or two.. EVERYBODY has the same policy.. I mean I am not bill gates.. but as far as I know any healthy business that exists for some years now -mining did not start yesterday- and has such big client base invests on that so that it can deliver its products up to time... or atleast not half a year ++++ later... so maybe they are doing this on porpuse?? to sustain positive incomes to the bitcoin market?

and why is it that none of them offers credit card or paypal etc?? isnt this an alert on its own if a business asks you to preorder 5K$ product with western uninion especially if it is supposed to have lots of customers and global deals?? there should be a reason for credit card companies not to allow their policies or for them not wanting to include those options....

And also the products are almost useless if they arrive at such a late time.. even if I order a mosnter of 600GH/s for a "few" thusand bucks by the time I will get it delivered to me (almost a year or atleast half a year) 600GH/s would make me no income at all because of the higher difficulty and the other miners + the BC per block price dropping... so giving lets say 5k $ for a product that after a year (when you actually will receive it) cant make more than like 20$ a day and will drop this rate after some months.. is not just a bad investment.. its a preassured loss of money!

not to mention that you have to blindly trust a company in china (many cases) or even in europe or US 5k for so many months without having any hope for refund if something happens (like company closure or anything else) because of the payment methods that are usually bitcoins,westernunion,banktransfere...

Were am I wrong here? do you know any manufactuer that doesnt do those kind of shenanigans??

Any other advice or imformative links would be greatly appreciated.. thanks