Hi Riker,
1. I believe so - last I heard the plan was for a 3rd 757 in April, the previous 757s were crewed by a mixture of internal and external pilots. If you do a search here on PPrune w.r.t. Astraeus, you'll quickly find there are people here more directly involved in the operation who can probably answer these sorts of questions better than I can!
2. I moved to Astraeus from a LCC; I've moved to a 'major'. As I say, I was very happy at Astraeus, but the attraction of some very heavy metal (and I don't mean Bruce!) couldn't be resisted. Can't say how other people view things!
Z