Well this was my understanding of the questions and answers. I couldn't figure out what you were saying for #9 and #12.

1. A general user would probably require about 20 HP to get started. You may need up to 100 if you want to be active though. It is hard to answer this question because RCs are required for many thing such as votes, posts, comments and even some of the Dapp games.
2. You can get HP as rewards from posts (paid 7 days after). If you are running low while waiting, you can get a delegation at https://giftgiver.site/. There is a faucet there so you might get small amounts of HIVE and HP if you are consistently using it.
3. LP is essentially staked LEO.
4. Other than getting LEO curation rewards and the occasional airdrop to users, there is no other thing I know it is used for. By curation rewards, half of your vote goes to the author and the other to the voter. So the more you stake, the more LEO your vote is worth.
5. For a 0.5 LEO upvote, I think you would probably need about 5500 LP right now. It's hard to give an exact number since it depends on the total LEO staked and how much LEO is produced per block.
6. An upvote is essentially your way of approving of the content. This means your using your stake to give it rewards (HP and HE tokens).
7. Witnesses ensure the block chain work correctly and validates the blocks. The higher up the witness, the more block it validates and the more rewards they get. Essentially they are helping the block chain function
8. Anyone can be a curator. It just means upvoting on content you like or following someone else on a voting trial.
9. Not sure what you mean by this
10. Either in LeoFinance wallet clicking the person icon or HE/LeoDex Wallet and delegate.
11. I would just go to PeakD wallet and delegate.
12. Same as number 9. Define what is a mutual fund.
13. Just make sure to upvote content and don't let it sit at full. I think there may be some optimization you can do to vote near full power to get a small % or so.