Given a travel related situation, and given a specific question about the situation, summarize the question into a title

Can you give me all available options? I am a 20-year-old student. My friend and I want to travel to Italy. The embassy wants to make sure that I will come back to my country, so they want a proof like a house and a high salary. I run a website on the internet with 1,000$ a month earnings. Will they accept that? Or do I have to be an employee?

Schengen visa for a student

I will be travelling from a small city to a hub airport to catch Etihad Airways flight to Abu Dhabi. Travel from the small city to the hub is by a local airline because Etihad doesn't land at the small city. The whole journey from start to finish is on a single ticket:

Local city - hub : local airline
hub - Abu Dhabi: Etihad Airways
All of these on a single ticket.

If my flight gets delayed at the small city due to weather and I miss my connection at the hub, does Etihad reschedule me free of charge or do I lose my ticket?

What happens if local flight to a hub airport gets delayed and I have a connection at the hub airport

Background:

I was originally booked on WestJet from Boston to Glasgow through Halifax. This week, they informed me the BOS -> YHZ flight is canceled, and are wanting to route me BOS -> YYZ -> YHZ -> GLA, doubling the length of the itinerary.

I've called WestJet and they say they can't come up with anything better, so I'm looking for other alternatives.

One possibility is to book a flight on a separate airline from BOS -> YHZ, then take the original YHZ -> GLA flight (after telling WestJet that's what I'm doing, to avoid being seen as a no-show when I don't get on the plane in BOS; the agent I talked to said this would be possible).

The concern is that I will be traveling with checked bags, and these would be two separate tickets, so I'm assuming I will need to clear customs in YHZ, collect my bags, and then re-check them and go through security again, and I don't know how long that will take. Assuming nothing changes (and my faith in that is...tentative, at best), I will have 1 hour 50 minutes between the flights.

Questions:

Are my assumptions correct? I will need to collect bags, clear customs, re-check the bags, clear security?
How long does that process normally take? The flight from Boston is a small plane, arriving at 9 PM on a Sunday.
How long might that process take in the worst case scenario? (I mean, I suppose the worst case is it takes days because something goes horribly wrong, so I guess I'm really looking for an idea of what's a reasonable upper limit...)
It might be possible to get NEXUS before the trip. How much will that affect things?
Customs for connections through Halifax with checked bags and separate tickets