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Notes -
On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.
"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.
"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?
There was a group of so-called "Cotton Whigs" who were in favor of industrializing the South, but they operated under the assumption that slave labor could be used in factories just as it could on farms. Whether they were right or wrong about this is subject to debate, but it's useful in examining the arguments you see sometimes from amateurs that had the North laid off the slavery question and focused on industrialization the institution would have died on its own. Like I said in my other comment, we know that know, but it wasn't obvious at the time, when advocates like James De Bow were talking about the ways slavery could be used in an expanded non-agricultural economy.
But altogether I think you're correct in the sense that an industrialized South doesn't view the expansion of slavery as necessary for self-preservation. I think the more interesting hypothetical is what would have happened had the South considered the slavery matter settled, whether by extension of the Missouri Compromise line, popular sovereignty, or some other mechanism.
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