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The elections in 1800 and 1826 were decided by the House. For discussion about alternative electors, you can look at the 1960 Hawaii slate of alternative electors which were accepted by VP Nixon over the certified electors. In so far as a VP decided whether to count votes, Thomas Jefferson decided to open and count the electoral votes from Georgia despite them being obviously fraudulent thus awarding himself the presidency (well, after the House determined Jefferson should be President after Aaron Burr attempted to take it for himself given both received the same number of votes).
For a detailed discussion of the VP exercising the power to reject or pick elector slates, here is a response to a criticism by John Eastman which lists historical examples as well as many law review articles which discuss the topic and also clarifies exactly what Eastman's plan and advice was about what was to happen in Jan 6. Calling this plan "a coup," to be frank, is ridiculous.
Trump filed election contests well within the legal deadlines. These election contests were not "rejected quite early," with 6 of 7 contests still pending by the date of the safe-harbor elector slate certification in December. In Georgia, the court flatly refused to put the state required hearing and processes onto the court docket which resulted in an appeal, an order to do force them to do that, and then the trial court simply refusing to do it and then declaring the contest moot after Jan. 6.
Gores theory was much more limited than Trumps. Gore requested hand-recounts in only 6 or so counties and he hoped those election offices would find the ballots he needed. And thus those counties were indeed finding those ballots until GOP protesters/lawyers/rioters broke into their Broward County office and stopped them from making up ballots. It was this "recount" effort which was stopped.
No, there are multiple levels to contesting election results at the state and federal level. The winner of an the presidential election is determined by the process outlined in the US Constitution. By the date which electors were required to be certified, 6 or 7 election contests were still pending. Holding otherwise would mean states are required to abide by the illegal or unconstitutional election results of other states and have no way of contesting this, especially post-Texas v Pennsylvania where the SCOTUS laughably claimed a state doesn't have a judiciable interest in the outcome of an election.
Which was foreseen and why there is specific language in the US Constitution, a short document, outlining a process in the case of contest election.
Gore didn't contest the electoral college vote. He could have. If he had and refused to count votes from Florida which would have resulted in neither candidate having the required majority electoral college votes, the election would be decided by state delegation from the House, as outlined in the US Constitution specifically to be a back-stop and ensure a winner would be determined during a contested election situation. Alternatively, the Congress could have set-up a commission to determine which votes they would count and for whom like they did in 1876. Alternatively, he could have counted an alternative elector slate and attempted to declare himself winner and then the joint-session would have decided what to do.
No. Most (I think all) states which were in dispute in 2020 either lost court battles over their illegal election process or made substantive changes to their laws which made the 2024 election better than the 2020 one. Also, there is a difference in kind between an election decided by 40,000 ballots in 3 states and millions of ballots across 8 or 9 states including the popular vote by approximately 2.5m ballots.
I've found people defending the 2020 election to be engaged in shady and motivated reasoning which essentially assumes the outcome, much like you do here and demanding a standard they know full well is impossible to meet even under the assumption substantial fraud took place. Additionally, they don't particularly care nor do they particularly have the knowledge about it anyway which makes dialogue about it mostly unproductive.
Under a defensible standard for election contests, i.e., making a showing that there are likely enough ballots in dispute which is higher than the difference in a race - interestingly enough the standard used by American courts everywhere except in 2020 where the standard was ignored or avoided, the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that it is impossible to truly determine the winner of the election. If you have interest, here is a relatively short article about the issue.
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