there are ways around it though such as obfuscated javascript linking and other methods of making a link unrecognized as a link

No this won't work. it's called pagerank sculpting and used to work but Google fixed that a couple of years ago by making the nofollow counts as a link and instead all you are doing is throwing away your page juice.

Bad idea to launch 5 sites for the same company addressing the same targets. One site representing your company (if same product) is the rule.

If you can use different IPs, private domain registrars, no interlinking, different contact info, and different content you can get away with it. If you're just throwing up 5 sites on the same server with similar info you're asking for trouble.

Change the image names if they aren't SEO friendly though

The most important thing to remember is that keywords in folders do not help push rank, keywords in filenames do.

So if you want a folder named /utc/ because it makes the site structure more logical than do it, but understand that it's not helping rank for "utc"

Therefore, in my opinion this is best

www.eteach.com/talent-pools-at-utc

this is acceptable

www.eteach.com/utc//talent-pools-at-utc

this doesn't target "utc" for SEO

www.eteach.com/utc/talent-pools

and hyphens are better than one word or underscores

No redirect needed when changing title tags, only knowledge to optimize them well.

Regarding your 301's, I would look at what redirects the site is currently doing and see if it can be cleaned up if you think you are daisy chaining 301 redirects due to multiple site overhauls.

it depends on the length of the form, if it's a short whitepaper email gen form for instance, sidebar global works great.

Excuse me, it's late in the day. Embedding is still referencing the sites image URL right?

Also, what if the site changes the directory or something and all the images on your site now 404.