I have 1300 hrs in the 300C, good heliopter for the size. Remember flying 3 up front a few times, almost had the collective between my legs. Flew lots of Santa flights too, one where the belts would not fit around the jolly old man. Flew him anyway, can't keep Santa from the kids.
Starting was always a bug with the 300. I think it's due to the 'shower of sparks' booster for the mags used during starting. I flew an Enstrom F28C with a IO-360 engine that was a dream to start. I always sweated starting the 300.
Had a few overspeeds on start over the years too. The tach needle wips around so bad on start that it left you scratching your head as to whether you had an overspeed or not.
I think it flys so nose low because it has no mast tilt and not much horizonal tail area. The canted fin also caused it to pitch and yaw in turbulance.
As to RPM Keystone had 5 of them in 1974 used for Cable Patrol, all flying was below 3oo ft. Flight manual in those days said use 3200 below 500 ft so that is what we did. In turbulance the thing would yaw so much the RPM would be 3000 to 3400 inspite of your best efforts to control it. Huges finally gave us permission to fly at 3000 and use 3200 for take off and landing only. When we were using 3200 all the time we had several engine problems because of valves bouncing off the seat at RPM above 3200.
An engineer at Lycoming said the cam dropped the valve too fast if you got above 3200, valve would bounce off the seat. Didn't take too much of that to cause a problem. Later they changed to cam.
I also delivered a new 300, a police version that was the 'quiet' version it allowed cruise at 2500 RPM. Felt strange flying with that slow a rotor RPM.
Keystone flew the **** out of those 300. 25-30 hrs a week on 4 helicopters for 9 years. After the first few years they ran and ran.