[drktmplr12]

You should care about weight. At higher levels the penalty becomes much larger. For example, looting a hill giant at level 51 reduces my AC by 80 or so. This is me starting at ~16 stones.

Side note, you should be able to get your Robe of the Lost Circle soon, which will add some nice melee stats. Can get the solB piece in royals group at your level, which is a popular camp. The raster of guk piece is a bit tougher because no one camps that area and he is pretty rare. Will have to bring a friend or wait till ~50 to be capable of soloing reliably.

Question 1:

When you calculate haste, the value for delay is always rounded. If you are using a SoS for instance, with delay of 28. Your resultant delay after the hangman's noose is 28 / 1.17 = 23.93 => 24. Switch to an FBSS and it becomes 28 / 1.21 = 23.14 => 23. There's a ~4% improvement. Switch to Dragonborn and it drops to 28/1.26 = 22.2 => 22. There's ~9%, exactly what you would expect.

Whether this is more important than other items? Hard to say... the difference between 150 STR and 225 STR is pretty large as you probably notice when a shaman buffs you. Recall that STR affects your accuracy and how often you hit for max. Generally you can sit at around 170 STR and shaman buffs will top you off while druid buffs get you really close. What will you sacrifice to get to 170 STR?

Question 2:

I prefer dual wield over 2hb, especially a slow item like IFS. High dmg/delay items can be plagued by bad RNG. Not to say that it doesn't happen with dual wield, but the downside of missing is much less pronounced. That being said, i can't afford a nice 2hb and currently sporting a jade mace/KD.

It's hard to beat AC/SoS combo in most cases. Only if you have your epic,access to wu's fist of mastery or bo staff does the story really change.

People will probably argue that I am wrong.. and that's fine.