Like Psych Majors would say "our own reflection in other people annoys us the most". I ask my fair share of noob questions and have to admit that noob questions of others annoy me.
Your questions are beyond noob. You need to educate yourself on SIP and how people survived without it before 2015. Recovery environment is a mini OS that requires a supported Mac to run OOB or needs patching to work on unsupported. Mojave is never meant to be run on HFS+ so you are on your own here(lots of people had success doing so).
-Re. "Noob-Beyond Noob": Sorry, but I won't venture much further into a conversation with someone who needs to resort to putdowns at this adolescent level. I've been around computer forums long enough to take the measure of someone like yourself: Big fish in small pond. Actually, you haven't been around here that long --just over a year, maybe not such a big fish. (Couldn't you have offered the information you wanted to present without the putdown and snarky tone?)
That done with:
-And sorry, but I am very well educated about SIP. Like many others I survived very well for years without it, by staying away from dodgy sites and downloads, but given the choice I prefer to keep it enabled, and will have to give some consideration to whether I want to run with SIP disabled by default, with Mojave (including very ugly black, almost unreadable Dark Mode on non-metal GPU) or continue with 10.13 unsupported next year at EOL. Perhaps unlikely, as malware can install on the non-SIP files, but there's always the chance that, even with employing the most caution, one might run into something that does want to modify/install in those locations. Even with SIP enabled, I run
BlockBlock, as well as a few other defensive programs.
->>"Mojave never meant to run on HFS+": Quite likely so, but not everyone is running an SSD, to which APFS was tailored. With an HDD, which I employ, it is pretty well known by now that APFS has major drawbacks on platter drives. Maybe you should do some reading from
Mike Bombich's excellent analysis:
And I do have Mojave on an APFS formatted partition, in order to be able to get security or supplemental updates, then clone back to the HFS+ volume -- the APFS volume mostly for updating, but nothing I would want to stay with for daily use.
