For issue 2 I found that this is more or less a Joomla thing. The image in the intro article is only clickable when the artickle title is set to clickable.
When I make the Title clickable the layout changes into the layout of the default link. Because that is not what i want, i made an override of the file layouts\joomla\content\intro_image.php and changed the following line:
<?php if ($params->get('link_titles') && $params->get('access-view')) : ?>
into
<?php if ($params->get('access-view')) : ?>
Now the image in the intro is clickabel and not the title.