Post Hierarchy with pathauto

Having scoured these forums I've found many a post that skirts the issue but none that smack it on the head with a hammer.

I'm a blogger with a little experience, I've been using Wordpress for many a moon and it has been said to

has a reputation for being very user friendly

An example of why it is so user friendly: You want to setup a hierarchy of pages you write the page pick a parent and it works out the URL for you. You write a page of the root with 'about' as its 'node' then a sub page with 'why' as its node and parent of 'about' and you get {root}/about/ and {root}/about/why/ respectively. Its done and dusted straight of the initial install in 60 seconds and 40 secods of that was typing the pages!

So you can do something similar in Drupal, but if you type in {root}/why/ you go to what would be displayed at {root}/about/why/.

So what do you need to do this in Drupal? You need the path.module and the pathauto.module. But finding the documentation on what settings to get the system to work like wordpress is near impossible, but finding implementations of this in drupal the real world is easy. And still if you type in {root}/why/ you go to what would be displayed at {root}/about/why/.

So the questions are:

Specifically what settings do I use in pathauto to get an Taxonomy Hierarchy?

How do I stop a child node working at the same hierarchy level as the parent?

How do you do reuse the same 'tag' about under a different 'tag' in the taxonomy without multiple instances off the route?

Why doesn't Drupal work out the URL for you based on the Parent Child relationships but will allow you to give it a URL completely outside of it node hierarchy?

If it involves using the 'category' feature why can't I make this 'categoy' a page to be viewed as a node would be?

Why is a module so crucial to content management a) not part of the core? b) so poorly documented; only 3 pages of help in handbook?