If you're shooting moving things and want to pan with them, a ball makes it (more) difficult to move smoothly in the direction of the subject movement and control any other motions..

What's the angle of the camera axis to the window pane? If you are shooting at 90 degrees to the window, that will give the most reflection right back to the camera. Change to a sharper angle and reflection will be reduced.

Don't see your pix, but I have to ask: What in the world did you need a 1/4000 shutter speed for? That speed, slow ISO, smallish aperture.....you have to have been severely underexposing. The brightest sunniest day would require more exposure than that. The noise is from the camera trying unsuccessfully to figure out what to do.

I know nothing about Lightroom, nor will I ever need to use it. One question though...
Does Lightroom enable the camera to be mounted (seen) in the computer even if the particular camera cannot do that via only the computer's OS? Like the Nikons that initiated this thread?

I believe loss in transferring data bits is more of a concern than just voltage for charging, though extreme length can cause excessive voltage drops. This is all basic electricity.

Okay, I'll bow to your knowledge, opinions and possibly your predictions...with just one fact. An optical viewfinder doesn't have or introduce ANY "dots". No pixels. Nothing. It conveys the continuous-tone image just as it exists. Like a lens. Are you comparing the appearance of a matte focusing screen to an EVF?

USB extension can be fussy. I've tried a 6 inch extender to connect a flash drive to a laptop. It has not consistently worked. A wireless mouse transmitter is a similar situation.
Why are you not plugging it directly into the hub? That's what I do, and never have a problem. There is loss involved in extra connections in cabling of ANY kind.

I discovered using Canon's EOS Utility to connect computer to EOS 60D to do remote shooting.. Wanted to go 15 feet. All I had was a 6-foot USB A-to-Mini B cable and multiple extension cables. It worked fine.
But I bought a 15 foot A-to-Mini B cable to avoid possible pitfalls of extensions. As a test I tried out adding three 3-foot extensions to it and that worked fine too.

Shows that exceeding USB design specs CAN work, but you never know what could be getting lost in the transmission, and when. Same thing goes for Ethernet cables, Firewire, AC power lines and anything else.
There can also be cable spec/quality factors.

Maximum cable length specs exist for good reason. And a single long cable (within length-limit specs) is preferable to connecting multiple short cables.

Why are you using the "graphic arts lenses" (also known as process camera lenses)? I'm a former graphic arts/process camera operator from way back (47+ years)in the printing field. I learned early-on that the concept of using smaller apertures for greater depth of field, in general photography, was not applicable to the graphic arts camera. The reason....a process camera is photographing FLAT surfaces only. Process lenses are (were) not intended or optimized for three-dimensional subjects. They have an "optimum" best-performance aperture, which was 2-3 stops down from wide-open.

That's probably what differentiated enlarger lenses from camera lenses also.

Period?

Usedphotopro.com aka Robertscamera.com has been a steady source for me . Check them out. They are a pro-level dealer in Indiana.

Usedphotopro has a big ebay presence, but if you go direct to their site and find the same item, it will very possibly have a lower price, and they have special markdowns too.
Commonly free shipping either way.

I'll second that emotion. Why does anyone think electronic viewfinders are an improvement?

Their (Nikon's)software downloads web site says in a big red font "New camera models ship with View NX 2 which includes Nikon Transfer 2. For newer cameras and computers,
please use View NX 2."

It's too bad they can't simply say that you must use this software to simply connect certain cameras via USB because without the software the camera will not mount AT ALL. "Please use" doesn't quite make the point.

So sum up the problem, I think it's being stated that the "Nikon D850, D4 and perhaps other newer Nikons" do not mount on the desktop of a Mac when connected by USB, right?
Can anyone verify if this is true and normal? Is this with Windows also? Has a Mac user (I'm not one and don't own Nikons either) verified this with Nikon?

I love to simplify for people who need it. Does not a camera, when connected to a Mac, mount on the desktop or in the file manager, so you could simply open the camera folder and move/copy your files to the computer? It doesn't take any software but the operating system to do this.
Yes, cameras come with apps (like Canon's EOS Utility and ZoomBrowser), but I don't bother with them (I'm a Windows user) simply to move files from camera to computer.
Putting the camera's SD card into the computer is the same thing. You just have to decide whether you want to handle the card or connect with a cable.

The original question is so wide-open that one does not know where to begin answering it. But here's a start......image quality will be determined by the LENS and focusing, not by the camera body, assuming exposure settings are okay. If you will be doing huge magnification enlargements then megapixel count could become a factor. For landscape work, I'd think maybe the magnification percentages to get to 16x20 would be lower than if you were cropping a small part of the image to blow up to 16x20. Still, how many megapixels you "need" could come from experienced landscape shooters.
A high-priced camera does not give you "better" images than a lower-priced one. What different models offer is different little features, most of which may be of no consequence to you.

Yes, black things ABSORB heat quicker than white or silver ones. On the other hand, black surfaces RADIATE (give off) heat better than light-colored ones. That's why radiators, electronic heat sinks etc. are painted black. I'll leave it to others to decide which is "better" for a camera or lens.