If it is fine for the project then you can also possibly use a combination of editconfig and listeners.For e.g removing insert from cq:actions in editconfig for these components should disable addition of components above them. And if more checks are needed then a beforeedit listener can also be cre...

Cloud manager runs different checks as part of code quality pipeline, you can refer following table to understand when it will cause failure https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-cloud-manager/content/using/code-quality-testing#code-quality-testing-step So, there can be multi...

Yes, as far as my understanding goes, this header is specific to Fastly CDN cache only and is not directly related to dispatcher cache. https://www.fastly.com/documentation/reference/http/http-headers/X-Cache/ 

x-cache MISS suggests that request was not cached at the CDN level. So, although the header is present your response was not served from CDN cache. If you are looking to completely bypass Fastly CDN, I don't think it will be possible since it is part of AEMaaCS architecture itself.Hope this helps

 I checked on both AEM6.5 as well as on AEMaaCS SDK and execution plan looks different. And for both versions cqPageLucene is not being picked unless I specifically add the type predicate. So, there might be some customizations done in your project to the indexes which you can possibly check. 

Is it possible to share screenshots from explain query tool for both your queries ? If same index is being picked for both your queries, it is interesting to see how the second query is taking more time.

You can try using guessTotal which is also the recommended approach for pagination. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-65/content/implementing/developing/platform/query-builder/querybuilder-api#implementing-pagination 

Your first query is probably picking pathreference index due to which execution time is less.You can use explain query tool to understand which indexes are being used for which querieshttps://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/operations/query-and-indexing-be...

Cache-control header is mostly to limit your CDN cache. For dispatcher cache, you need to provide proper rules in your dispatcher configuration file in order to specify what you want to cache and what not. You can define rules like this if you don't want to cache some content/0003 { /glo...

If this is some external dependency which doesn't come out of the box in AEM and which you are trying to use in AEM, then you will have to embed that jar as well in your package. You can check this  https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager/embedding-and-installing-ex...