For the downloading itself, you could try the 3 options that are given to download but the gameforge servers to download from work the best, so i'd sugest to download them from there as otherwise it would take hell of a time with the other share sites.
Not in my experience (or experience of a friend who recently reinstalled). GF links have resulted in numerous corrupted downloads. The share sites, while they are much slower, are more reliable. Might have something to do with where you are compared to the download servers.
Agree with rest of your message, though.