Is this a good format?

It's a great format. Thank you, excellent tutorial.

Can you reference where you learned of all the template constructs like:

{$record->customFieldDisplayByKey('your custom field key', 'display')|raw}

And you mention there are variations on this - is there a place in the Invision Documentation that describes these?

Sadly this is one of these things where you have to ask questions and explore the code to find what to use.