Your Questions Answered...

There can only ever be 5,000 Progenoforms generated. The tiered mint pricing is encoded into the contract and broken up into 10 tranches to favor the brave who mint early. The first 500 tokens are available at a price of 0.01ETH and if they are minted out then the next 500 tokens may be minted at 0.02ETH each, and each time a tranche of 500 has been collected, the price moves up by 0.01ETH. See the current mint price HERE. You can mint from this website if you are comfortable to connect your wallet, or you can mint from the contract HERE
The project is launching with 8 color palettes but the contract can accomodate up to 256 palettes. They are derived from a mathematical equation to ensure cohesion and more palettes will be added regularly to add diversity. As the tokens themselves are upgradeable, you may find that your tokens can get a brand new look whenever you want them to, perhaps by swapping to a newer color palette. In fact, the contract can handle up to 256 distinct algorithms so each token can be rendered in multiple ways as chosen by their owners.
There are some constraints that will be applied to all renderers which are added to the project. Firstly, they should have meaningful ways to interpret the token traits to give each token it's individual character. They probably will not require external libraries to be rendered in the browser (given that the browser application, Javascript, WebGL are themselves dependencies but ones which seem likely to persist).

Renderer 0 uses Signed Distance Functions to render the outlines of regular geometric shapes which follow a smooth but irregular orbit, and a ping-pong shader technique to smudge the output from the last frame into the new computed one.
Yes, each Progenoform is minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, ensuring authenticity and provenance.