Point by point:
There is a better engine for .doc/x export in development right now. In fact you can try it if you wish, as it is in public beta. In the meanwhile if you’d rather not, as I recommended you can use LibreOffice to open these RTF files and then save it from there as a .doc file for Pages. No need to have your colleague do that for you, and if you are attempting to wrestle out better formatting as it sounds like you are, introducing a third element of complexity and unknowns into your workflow is going to make all of that more difficult.
Well, I would say let’s not try and figure that out quite yet until you have your own conversion set up. We have no idea what the other person did with the RTF file when they converted it. For all we know they applied some stylesheet to it or something. If you are willing to try the beta, definitely do that first. I’ve tested between Scrivener 2.2.0.5 and Pages using .docx and the results are very nice. Pretty much precisely how you tell Scrivener to format the document.
I’m not quite sure what you mean, but if you are saying what I think you mean, that depends on your style guide. Some in fact do call for that behaviour. At any rate, we don’t have any control over that at all. We insert the proper footnote codes, and that that point it’s up to the word processor to handle them and display them in accordance with the style guide you need or prefer. The footnote code itself isn’t “on a page” so to speak, in the RTF file. There actually aren’t any pages in RTF files, in the same sense that there are in PDFs. That level of detail is handled by the display engine of the word processor in real time. Again, this could be a setting your colleague made in Word, or it could be in Pages, but those are the only two places that layout would come from.