Remix competitions are a great way to grab vocal stems and to just practice remixing - and if nothing else just release it as a bootleg or change some of the elements around and remake it as an original! You can still get attention from it.

Yeah, if you read the terms thoroughly. Some comps won't even let you put your mix on SoundCloud. I learned this the hard way.

You'll probably get the best results if you build it yourself, so you only get what you need. This guide might help. You'll want lots of storage and RAM, plus a sound card to reduce latency.

If it makes good music, it makes good music. Done right, it gives musicians something inspiring to write about; done wrong, it just takes you out of the music.

If you want your drums to sound live, the answer is listen to live drumming. Classic disco is the place to go for dancey drumming that isn't all mechanical, and cool jazz (ie ballads, not the faster "hot jazz") is a good way for drummers to improvise while still keeping a groove.
That won't fix everything, but you can pick up common rhythm figures and ghosting patterns from stuff like that, plus it'll teach you a ton about fills.

Harmor can do that, load a sample and it'll resynthesize it and play it like any other sound.

Post your soundcloud... If you don't have any songs finished, then I highly doubt anyone will be willing to collab with you.

Yeah... people generally only collab if they know it'll be fun. Think about what you can bring to the table, that another producer wouldn't get on their own. Otherwise, one person just ends up giving the other lessons over Skype. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not a collab.

If you're going for a riddim type drop, it needs to have riddim. The pattern you're using doesn't drive the track forward, it just plods along. There's no energy, no excitement. It might work in a 170BPM track, but not every pattern works at every tempo. Try adding more 16th note syncopation, especially with some swing; that'll make people want to move, instead of it just kind of going by.

Interested in how you made the Boss Mode Lead!!!!

This is a pretty standard trap horn, and I think a lot of them use resynthesis (I used Harmor). You get the basic sound by loading a short vocal sample (I used FLS_OhYeah.wav), setting the speed to 0, and finding a syllable that sounds nice and trappy (right at the beginning, for this one). Turning the bottom Scale knob to 0 puts the sound in key (by locking all the partials to harmonics of the root note), and turning the formant mix all the way up makes sure it doesn't get too nasal. You can tweak the formant shift, too. Here's what all of that looks like
For post processing, there's a bandpass to get it all in the mids, giving it that trap horn sound, some distortion (I used the Cube shape), and a ton of reverb/delay/comp.