Bunch of similar iRules

We have been running w/ 1 for pool selection & redirect rules for several years and it works well as long as you cover all use-cases. Since you are talking about rules that only change in a couple variables, you could have a single string list that uses VIP name as the key & your other variables are space delimited.

For 2, it could be done in v9 using global variables but I'm not sure how partitioning or future changes to the LTM OS will make global variables harder to guarantee.