looks like you know the answer to you own question.
if you posses the knowledge you say you do then i wouldn't take an junior level job. That knowledge should be demonstrable on your resume to links to your talk on your personal webpage or out on the net.
I had an issue getting an old stick to boot, never did figure out what the problem was, it held data just fine, I even tried to format it. I used a 2 GB scandisk cruzer like Kris pointed out and it works just fine.
the answer to your question is probably on the BT forum but any U3 drive will for sure be bootable even though any fairly new USB stick "should" work too
the first time you run any msf instance, it will create the .msf directory in /root. after that you should be able to add code and msf find it automagically
the simple point is that no one asked for his help. whether he found vulnerabilities is entirely irrelevant. He broke into systems he wasn't supposed to access.
Also, lets use some common sense, there is an idea of precedent. it wouldn't make much sense for the gov to to let him off, because then the next criminal would cry about how the govt let mcckinnon off with a slap on the wrist for the same thing.
i need to digest most of that but the key part of the hack is that the database is running as a priv user correct? and you see that alot? is there a good reason people are still doing that?