Welcome to Realm Works
1a. Unless you are an experienced coder with an ability to work stuff out yourself I would never recommend picking up Hero Lab for an unsupported system. There are but a handful of people who have successfully created their own systems and the ones that have appear to be unable to share what they have done due to licensing concerns which further limits the material you can learn from.
1b. If you are playing 5e I highly recommend Hero Lab. I love Hero Lab.
2a. Ctrl Shift ~ - this shortcut is your best friend. As soon as you have entered what you want to enter, press this key combination and all the empty snippets will be removed. You can add it back in using one of the options on the topics toolbox menu should you need to add more info.
2b. I also don't really like the individual snippet (5e) as it does not contain the same format as the monster stat block. Most npcs created in official 5e products follow a similar format to the monster. Therefore I created my own custom topic which combines everything from the monster topic with an individual topic. This works perfectly for me. I don't hide the original though, not until the content market comes out and I know how the program will react to external data that uses the original topics.
3. Sources are something you will see a lot of once the Content Market comes out. They are effectively the landing pad for new users to that content (and are linked from the Lets Begin button once you complete an import). These topics will be used by content designers to tell you what the content and how to use it from a Realm Works perspective. Load some of the free content from the CM and you can see them in use. I would not recommend using these for anything else as you will quickly lose control of this category once you start importing data. Unless of course you don't plan on importing data.
4. Since you are playing 5e I highly recommend jumping into our
Facebook Group. If you check the
Units (learning content) on the left we have links to all sorts of stuff. Primarily though we have a shared google sheet which contains links to the 5e SRD. It's not the official LWD one but it will give you a boost on your data entry needs.