Best way to learn?

Consider this: You've just pointed out that you'd have no idea if our recommendations were sound, then asked for advice. Thus, you're asking for advice you can't verify, which will in turn be used to verify our advice. Seems a tad circular, don't you think?
In all seriousness, if the person advising you has a decent number of little badges (such as Gaming Expert, Graphics Authority, etc.), you can general trust that they're experienced and that they give good advice.

Now, to address your questions:
1: At a lower budget it would vary, at a high budget always Intel. The i5-4670k is the best gaming CPU there is, right now.
2: Varies by the specific i5 and i7, but if you mean the i5-4670k and i7-4770k, pretty much nothing except hyper-threading.
3: Probably a pretty weak one. Those sorts of games have very low requirements, though if you even intended to play games with higher requirements, you might get a stronger GPU (though that would depend, of course, on budget).
4: It varies. And there are so many because it varies. Some cases are quiet, some cases are very good for cooling, some cases look very nice, some cases are cheap, some cases are good for mounting radiators for water-cooling, some cases are combinations of some of the above elements...
5: When you're gaming, no. If you're doing things like video editing, yes. 8GB is all you need for gaming, but for editing and some other applications 16+ is justifiable.
6: Varies by case. On a good case, usually no. You get a stock cooler, but if you want to overclock (or you live in a very hot place) you'd want to replace it with a stronger aftermarket cooler.
7: SSDs are never needed but always nice. They essentially eliminate load times, and are thus usually used to store OS, applications, and games with longer loading times. Additionally, SSDs come in sizes from >40GB all the way up to 512GB or more, 120-128 is just the most efficient in most cases.
8: Everyone says their brand is best because (assuming they're informed folks) it was the same information that lead them to believe that which lead them to purchase those cards. Brand does very much matter, as different brands have different warranties, coolers, printed circuit boards, and often times different reliability. Good names include ASUS, EVGA, Sapphire, and Gigabyte.
9: NOOOOOO! Well, perhaps, but you're going to be essentially burning money if you do. It would essentially depend on how much energy and time you're willing to invest in saving money and getting better quality. If you get a build from this forum (from a trustworthy source, of course), order and assemble the parts yourself, and do it correctly, you will not only save a huge amount of money, you'll end up with a much higher-quality end result (prebuilt PC brands scrimp on everything they can, particularly "invisible" parts like motherboards, power supplies, and storage), not to mention a feeling of satisfaction and a much greater degree of understanding of your system.

Hope this was helpful.