for number 1 it's really quite easy, I made sprite battlers ala FFVI in paint with no real problems and you can have them holding different weapons with no problem either. I'll load up a battle grid sqaure and my characters so you can see how it works then I'll tell you where to put them in.
-this is a few different poses, the center two are just the character standing stationary.
-this is the battle grid, draw your character in the center, each three squares are an animation thread, so fill in all three then erase the black squares. Save this on your computer, open it in paint, then export a charbattle set from the RM, open that too then copy the image of the battle grid and past it in the exported charset. This is to get a correct colour pallet.
with your new battlechar set, import it into the RM, go to database then animations 2, make a new character in the left section then set the correct animations to the right in the poses tab.
Now all that's left is the weapons. Here's my weapon set, feel free to just put the new weapon general same area.
- make your weapons then import into the weapon tab, you can also have it set up in the items area for the different weapons, so sword A uses weapon animation A.
(I may have gotten some of this wrong as im in a rush, ill be back later to check it~ Edit: Seems fine)