You can't reverse engineer an orange item - at least I couldn't, even one I crafted myself. You reverse engineer things in an attempt to learn new recipes and orange recipes don't fit in the usual sequence - I think they are only obtained through random drops in gathering missions. Otherwise you RE green items in the hopes of learning blue recipes and blue in the hopes of learning purple - and to recover at least some of the comps as well.

Basically you have 2 choices on how to advance your gear: 1) you can try to get orange gear and improve the mods, either through crafting or by buying mods with commendations, etc. 2) You can stick with normal, non-moddable gear and advance it through crafting, quest drops, commendation purchases, etc. Both paths should be equally viable, at least in theory, it remains to be seen in if it will in practice. Also, I am not sure if ALL gear slots are moddable - I know you can get moddable weapons, chest pieces and leg pieces, but I haven't seen other equipment slots that are truly moddable (although you can craft exceptional items that take augmentations). The orange armor path lets you find a look you like and stick with it, the other path is going to vary your look as you swap pieces in and out. In practice so far I have been able to mix both - my sorcerer has a mod-able chest piece, and has been updating that, his light saber and a mod-able weapon I got for my companion buy buying mods with commendations. But I also took synthweaving and have had good luck making a lot of nice blue gear for most of my other slots and for all of Khem Val's equipment, since he basically wears heavy jedi armor.

odd - all I have been getting from scavenging is aluminum when I need desh for my beginning armor crafter. Just out of curiosity - what recipes use aluminum? I know I haven't gotten far with crafting as I am still playing around with L10-14 chars, but I haven't seen any recipes in armor or arms that use aluminum at the lower levels.

I don't know about locking the camera angle - but you can select targets by left clicking on them with the mouse cursor or using tab to cycle through visible enemies. Your current target will show up in the circle on the right hand end of your hotkey bar (opposite your own portrait) and it shouldn't change unless you tab or left click on another valid target. Unlike first/third person shooters you always attack the target you have selected no matter what your camera angle - although the attack may not go off if the target is out of range our behind an obstacle that blocks line of attack, usually due to movement. Tab targetting is not very good though - it sometimes ignores targets right in front of you and picks ones far away and sometimes won't pick any target even though there is one right on your screen. There is a key bind in the options menu to target the nearest enemy - but its unbound be default, you might want to try setting that to an easy key or mouse button that is not used for something else. I bind it to T (for target).