Which default create drop-down menu are you referring to? Can you be more specific 

instead of custom metadata field for this on you should be using the create review task workflow to have this on your assets and you can control who can approve or reject will be controlled by group that has the permission of doing the review.

Are you using Java 11 or java 8? It seems the maven-scr-plugin that you are using is not being supported by Java that you are using. Latest version of maven-scr-plugin supports java11 and if you are using java 11 try moving to latest version of maven-scr-plugin which is 1.26.4

Why don’t you try this one for sass compiler support on aem https://github.com/mickleroy/aem-sass-compiler

Why don’t you create a maven archetype project on your local using the project archetype instead of downloading the project archetype from any other git repo

Doesn’t you need to update at jcr:content node as page property is stored at that level.curl -u admin:admin -Fsearchable="true" http://localhost:4502/content/xyz/page1/jcr:content 

When you look maven repo for those dependent jars at https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jdom/jdom/2.0.2 you can look for the compile dependencies and check idle your aem or your Pom are using same version or different version

That means your dispatcher is not configured correctly. You need to debug on the dispatcher by setting the dispatcher log as debug and check what happens with the request 

Check request.log and access.log of aem publisher

So when you request page from dispatcher does the request going to aem publisher and if not then you might need to check the dispatcher rules for shortened url