As for screen flickering:
I found a quasi-fix for my problem. I found in another forum somewhere that if you completely disable the auto-brightness, it will stop flickering.
Obviously, it would be nice if the "auto-brightness" feature actually worked properly, and it is unfortunate that we have to disable it in order to have a functioning visual interface... but I suppose the siutation is analagous to when an escalator breaks down (they are still stairs!).
BUT! I, and many others, will report that I did shut off auto-brightness (using the touch screen interface settings), and the screen flickering problem persisted. Unfortunately (and I wish I could merit the original solver here, but I've lost the forum) for reasons unknown, Windows turns auto-brightness back on without your permission on a regular basis. So, if you shut it off from the preferences menu, it comes right back on. For me, this made me think that auto-brightness was not the issue causing the flickering.
However - when I went deep into advanced settings (not super easy to find on 8.1), I manually disabled "adaptive brightness," and now my screen flickering is gone (it's been about 2 weeks).
So, to recap:
"Adaptive brightness" appears to be broken, and this causes the flickering.
Shutting it off via:
"right swipe">Settings>Change PC settings>Power and sleep>Adjust my screen brightness automatically>No
--DOES NOT WORK to disable auto-bright.
Instead, shutting off via:
"right click on the windows icon">Control Panel>Hardware and Sound>Power Options>Change Plan Settings>Change advanced power settings>Display>Enable Adaptive Brightness>Off
--WILL work to disable auto-bright (at least for a decent amount of time..).
Just now - even entering the "Power and sleep" settings (in order to detail the path above) turned my adaptive brightness back on - EVEN THOUGH I didn't change a single setting.