fontcreator 14 vs fontlab 7 for variable font development

Re. 3: it depends what kind of font you are making and how complex you need the OpenType Layout to be. FontCreator’s OTL tooling is much closer to the GSUB and GPOS table level than the AFDKO code used in FL7 (and in a bunch of other tools), so I consider it superior. If you are making complex script fonts and need to be able to do any contextual GPOS work, then consider FontCreator.

Note that is a general comment re. OTL support. I have not tried using FontCreator to make variable fonts, so cannot comment on the best choice for 1 and 2. I do like FL7’s variable font tools.