1-A, If you have crafting shards in your inventory and press the stash materials button that is in the bottom left corner of your inventory alongside the sort items button then it will put all the crafting shards and runes you have into their own infinite and separate inventory which shows up when you start crafting things.
1-B, I myself, have 3-4 of my 6 tabs keeping almost only Idols but I keep getting more. So what I do now is only take the ones I think I will use in the future and have good synergistic mods like health and elemental protection or bleed and %physical or just high rolled damage mods with decent supporting affixes.
2, when I don’t have max block and I use shields then I always prioritize more block chance, then I focus on block protection which covers 6 of the 7 resistances you have, its really easy to get block armor from the passive tree too so its not all that high up there for me. reduced damage taken on block is an amazing affix and if you can get that and block chance to T5 then the rest should fall into place.
If I am not mistaken block protection also increases armor on block (and they plan to remove block armor since it is really confusing with block protection).
That’s probably the case but I could be wrong about the block protection also giving armor so I went with the safer bet, because either way, block protection is better then block armor in my opinion.