HELP: confusing Pandora & down/up-grading woes....

All this downgrade/upgrade/pandora business is so confusing. Especially if you've been downgrading PSP before pandora existed using exploits... and remember the days of 2.xx and 3.0x custom firmware. I've followed so many different downgrade/upgrade guides throughout the past 4 years of PSP life... and my magic stick has gone through several variants (noobz pandora, hellcat's, etc.)

Is there a geeky techie PSP custom firmware FAQ? For example:

1. Where are the files stored for the "magic stick"? Is it the msipl.bin file?

2. What's a NAND dump for? The one I did is like 34MB large?

3. Pandora process creates folders
/data
/dic
/font
/kd
/registry
/vsh

What are these folders? Do I need to keep them and not delete them?

4. I still have a file called eeprom.bin - as far as I remember this was a back up of my battery serial? But I've lost my original battery now... Do I still need this file?