Complexity results for Lower-Elementary Recursive Functions?
Concerning (bonus) question 3: the functions definable in the variant with $\log(x)$-bounded summation are all in the complexity class uniform $\mathsf{TC}^0$. This follows from the construction in Chandra, Stockmeyer and Vishkin "Constant depth reducibility", SIAM J. Comput. 13 (1984) showing that the sum of $n$ numbers of $n$ bits each can be computed by poynomial size constant depth circuits with majority gates.

With constant bounded summation you get a subclass of uniform $\mathsf{AC}^0$. Constant bounded summation can be reduced to addition and composition, and addition can be computed by constant depth boolean circuits using the carry-lookahead method.