Op amp output voltage swing vs noise
In terms of practical theory, all components have the ability to add noise, from reacting to external (emi) and internal (heating) sources of input you don't care for.  Nothing changes instantaneously so everything has some frequency-related characteristics.

As a general guess, yes several identical stages do tend to result in lower noise than something producing the same overall equivalent but with stages at the extremes.  This has to do with how extremes tend to produce less consistent results, and ultimately how entropy works.  But on top of that you can consider noise picked up in transmission, which promotes the idea that you want to strengthen a signal as much as close to the source as possible (before it picks up lots of noise).  However for specific signals at specific frequencies, you can potentially get better results by amplifying the desired frequencues more than the arbitrary ones.  Some per-stage (for tuning) and overall bode plots can assist in figuring out what signals you are aiding and rejecting.

For biasing, think how that affects the charge on the capacitors that are used to represent the same input states- in other words how small noise currents might affect the signal.