Your intuition will lead you astray! Just because insurance may be rare (1 in 13 hands doesn't seem rare to me, but that's beside the point) doesn't mean it's not valuable. If you get a lot of EV from a rare event, it can balance out to be profitable. From Blackjack Attack, insurance is actually the most valuable deviation you can learn, one third of the total value of the Illustrious 18! (Also, it occurs twice as often as 16v10)
This is a very good question. These days, you can't really make money flat betting. You'd need a single or double deck game with very lenient rules to do that, or some other way to get an edge.
However, you can make money with a spread. I plugged in your 1/2/4/8/16 spread into CVCX, and you can make $38 an hour with a $10,000 bankroll and 2% risk of ruin
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