How can I handle delayed records a month or older on a table clustered on time?
For question 2.

I think I will break the large table up into many different tables and then use a view to join them together. This will allow me to have something like table partitioning without the feature of table partitioning as outlined in this article.

https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/sql-tools/sql-server-partitioning-without-enterprise-edition/

View with schemabinding that unions all the tables together. Then I can insert data and select data from this view as if it was the primary fact table. I would only need to ensure all my SELECT queries on this view include the column I chose to partition the tables with to get the full benefit.