1) When I bought my first LEAF (July, 2011), I chose it because was an affordable pure electric car. The only two alternatives I knew of were out of my price range: the Tesla wildly so, and the Volt moderately so. Plus, I didn't like the idea of buying and maintaining two extra machines (Relative to the LEAF, the Volt has an extra gasoline engine AND another electric machine, all with about the same power rating as the primary electric motor). My expectations of poor reliability haven't been borne out, but I was listening to them at the time. And the price difference was real.
2) The LEAF I bought had been pre-ordered by someone else, who couldn't swing the purchase once the car actually showed up. But the dealer had already worked with whoever it was to get the car accepted into the Department of Energy's "EV Project" study, which meant that a Level2 home charging station was included at no extra cost to me, including installation. EVSE equipment was much more expensive at the time (I remember Lowe's carrying the GE Wattstation for $1K about then), so I was fairly pleased to get the freebie, even though I had to agree to letting the project collect data on my useage patterns, and even though the unit (a Blink - look them up here on the forum: there's an entire sub-group devoted to wailing over their shortcomings) was atrociously unreliable. I lucked out again in that all its serious functional problems were corrected by an onsite warranty service call I finally got not too long before the company went bankrupt. That was about three years ago, and it's been miraculously trouble free ever since. I don't think there's much opportunity anymore for getting a freebie home charging connection, but prices have come down quite a bit since then; I think the stations are going for $400 to $700 now, exclusive of installation. One of the cheapest ways to go is to have the portable EVSE cable that comes with the LEAF modified to handle 240V, and then have an electrician install a 240V electric dryer or range plug of suitable ampacity in your garage to plug the modified cable into. The downside of that is that you then have to chose between leaving the portable cable behind in your garage or constantly stowing/un-stowing it every trip.
3) Public charging points almost universally offer J1772-connectored charging cables. Unfortunately, that only gives you an AC charging session that you'll need to wait (at best 6.6KW speed) over two hours for (That's assuming a 20%-to-80% refill). Except for a couple times when I was just charging for the novelty of it, the only times I EVER use public charging is to use public "Fast" (DCQC) charging, because I'm on a fairly rare long-distance journey. At the moment, those kind of stations come in two flavors: CHAdeMO (the interface used by the LEAF and a couple other Asian EVs) and Tesla Supercharger. The Tesla folks can use CHAdeMO stations via an adapter, but LEAFs can't use Superchargers. And at some point, there may be problems if new DCQCs start having only "SAE Combo" charging plugs. So far, I think those few stations that offer SAE combo plugs are set up to handle CHAdeMO also. So the answer to this part of your question is "mostly yes".
4) My home electricity use, even including the LEAF, is still in the lowest price-bracket for my area. I haven't opted for time-of-use rates, so I'm paying somewhere around 12 cents per KWh. My commuting burns up about 5 to 5.5KWh per day; call it 170KWH/month. That's about $20/month. YMMV.
5) I initially expected my insurance to go down, but after hearing a bit about the very high cost of spare parts and collision repair, I can understand the rates going the other way. But from various people's reports, and my own experience as well, the insurance companies haven't actually figured it out yet, and so they all have just seemingly picked random algorithms. There's little rhyme or reason to it, but if you shop around, you can probably find spreads of at 3::1 or more in pricing, with at least one or two companies offering you about whatever your current rate is. But your insurance premiums are really determined by how accident prone you are, which, as we all know, is completely determined by what your financial credit score is. The resale value of EVs is apparently pretty dismal. I haven't much understanding of this, so hopefully others will speak to that part of your question.