Using your company name in the title tag isn't (generally) done with the intention of ranking for it. If you can't rank for your brand name, you've got bigger issues to deal with.

Adding the company name to a title tag is more for brand awareness. If people know your brand, it reinforces that they're in the right place. If you're not as well known, it gets that awareness going in the consumer's mind.

Is this the actual total number of results or the just the numbers it's showing at the top of the first page? The best way to tell how much Google really has indexed is do your search, go to the last page of results, choose to have omitted results included, get to the last page again, and multiple out how many results that is. I got 1,910 results using that method.

The description should be long enough to convey the features of the products, the benefits of it to the customer, and any other important info. If it's 50 words, it's 50. If it's 500, it's 500. Writing to hit a number means you're going to include a lot of fluff.

Since you asked this question, it sounds like you're not a copywriter. Pay one to write your product descriptions. It will totally be worth it.

It would also be smart to add the subdomains in Webmaster Tools in case one does get indexed and you need to remove it.

Because Google still has a long way to go at determining high quality content vs. low quality content, determining good backlink profiles vs. bad backlink profiles, etc. It's like people who write viruses - whatever the antivirus companies are doing, the writers are a few steps ahead. Same with Google. They're reactive, not proactive

The kind of SEO your competitor is practicing works and it always will. You don't have to follow in their footsteps, but obeying the mantra 'build great content and they will come' will take you a long time to get where they are, if it ever does get you there. Think of SEO like investing - it's all about your risk tolerance. Figure out how much you're willing to risk to get the rankings/sales/etc. that you want and go for it.

50% is a shockingly high success rate, way above the norm. I had a 16% success rate on one of our sites and around 35% on one of our much larger sites. I had one of the top names ever in SEO tell us that 5% would be a good success rate, though I think that's lowballing a bit.

Many people had big drops around the same time period, so likely an algorithm update that impacted you.