IOS 8 - Disentangling Camera Roll and Photostream - help!

Question

In iOS 8, Apple removed the “Camera Roll” and “Photostream” albums and collapsed them into a single stream of photos on the camera that can be accessed under “Collections”.  “Collections” also includes all other photos otherwise loaded onto the phone, e.g., via iPhoto. This new arrangement upsets several familiar ways in which I’ve been using my iPhone and its camera, and I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions for how to recapture a few simple functions.  (I have submitted Feedback on the elimination of the Camera Roll, and with this post I am looking for practical solutions to a series of new problems.)
Question #1.  I maintained my Camera Roll as a reasonably-well curated set of maybe 300 photos & videos, taken on my phone, that I could pull up easily to show to people.  I would like to know if there is a way to restore that functionality in iOS 8.  “Recently added” does not go back far enough (one of my favorites was the very first photo I took with any iPhone, back in 2007); and “Collections” shows way too much – it includes everything in Photostream, as well as photos from Albums of scans, non-iPhone photos and other sources that I’ve synced to the phone with iPhoto.  Thousands of photos.  I also don’t care for the way in which Collections interrupts the thumbnails with date and location information.
Question #2.  I kept Photostream turned on on my phone, because I liked the idea of automatically uploading photos to the cloud, particularly on trips when I was not in a position to download the photos directly to a computer for backup and safekeeping.  However, now that Apple has eliminated the distinction between “photos in my pocket” and “photos in the cloud”, it appears that whenever I want to delete a photo from my phone (e.g. to save space) I must also delete the corresponding Photostream copy.  Is there a way, with Photostream on, to delete local photos without also deleting the copy that has been uploaded to the cloud?
Question #3.  I have a few old iOS devices that I let my kids use.  They like to take photos and screenshots.  Most of them are pretty stupid but once in a while they do something great. I’ve left Photostream on on those devices to see what they’re up to, and to capture the occasional gem.  This was fine, when “Photostream” was a separate Album that I could look at, or not, as I chose.  In iOS 8 however, all of their junk photos appear in “Collections” and are as much a part of my phone’s photo repository as the carefully-curated Camera Roll photos used to be.  Is there a way to keep Photostream photos out of my “Collection”?
Question #4.  I suppose someone could write an app that does nothing but display photos that were captured by, and reside physically, on the device.  Perhaps someone already has, if anyone knows.  Of course I’d prefer to use the native app for this function, but I’d take the function over nativity if I had to choose.
Question #5. Does anyone know (“know” – please no speculation, and nothing that an NDA forbids) how the iCloud Photo Library, which dropped back to beta in the final release of iOS 8, works? Does it provide the backup and safekeeping function of Photostream, along with the ability to view that set of photos separately?  If so then I could turn off Photostream and at least get rid of that clutter.
Thanks for any and all help.  And by way of reminder - https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html .

Answer 1

Here's one, eh, kludgy fix for Question #1.  I don't exactly recommend it - it can be pretty laborious - but in the end it seems to get me back to about where I started with my Camera Roll.
Go into "Collections" and scroll back to about the date at which you expect to find your first native iPhone photo.  (I have many imported photos that predate iPhone, so I can't just look at the first ones.)  Tap through until you are looking at a single photo.  Look at the bottom.  If it displays a "Favorites" heart, it's physically on your iPhone (and as best I can tell, was taken by the device).  Tag it as a favorite.  Swipe to the next photo.  Skip if it shows no Favorites heart - that means it's not on your phone - and tag it if it does.
At the end of this process (did I mention it's laborious?), you should have a Favorites album that matches the photos that were on your Camera Roll when you upgraded to iOS 8.