Choosing optimal installation..

Hi all!
Seeking advice on multiple issues..

Kind of a reborn newbie to WordPress. Used it 5 years ago, but depression and alcohol took over, so I moved to a third world country to kind of finish it off in a happy environment. Yup, sad story, blah blah.. Now sober and off all the fun stuff, I am trying to get back into playing around with webdesign. But the technical world kind of moved forward during my absence, now with bootstrapper and other new stuff. And I have also forgotten a lot, used to be able to play around with .php and .css easily, but also vaguely remember that a spelling error crashed my index.php regularily.

I somehow managed to restore my Adobe Master collection, that includes dreamweaver which I am not familiar with. Yet. Used Frontpage and ftp back in the old days. I am using the illdy theme now, but not too happy with the editor.
So. I have a host and domain, wordpress is serverside installed. Now seeking advice to optimize my design process.

1. Should I do a local installation of wordpress to integrate it with dreamweaver of just find a useful wysiwyg editor plugin? Seem to remember that some TinyMCe or something was quite useful.

2. Finding themes. Googled it, mainly found a bunch of sites trying to get me to sign up and buy something. Any good links to sites with objective reviews of free themes. I do not mind paying for a pro version of a theme, but as newbie, I would like get more familiar with my themes, not paying for a theme I will dump anyway..

Yes, I probably have like 100+ more questions, but will leave it with that for now.

Thanks in advance!