Okay, here's my take on some your questions, where I have a little different or additional point of view:

Strap. This depends on your strap as much as anything else. I like and use what's called a cradle strap, which goes underneath the brackets way down to the bottom of the banjo, where the two ends of the strap are tied off to each other with strings which come with the strap. If you have a strap that's not made for that, I suppose there's nothing wrong with attaching to brackets.

Spikes. I have spikes, but find myself tuning the thumbstring manually instead, partly because when I hook under a spike it's always necessary to correct the tuning of the string anyway. Despite the frequent retuning of the 5th, strings last a long time for me anyway.

DAve Oesterreich