It can be useful to try shaving your head at least once just to see what it looks like. You're not bald yet so you can still grow your hair back if you don't like it.
Sure, I don't see the problem with transplanting grey hair. IMO it can often be beneficial, since grey/white hair can often hide imperfections that may arise with a hair transplant like plugginess and such.
Yeah, also things like headshape can influence how bad hair loss looks and such, and it is hard to 100 % match the drawings in the scale.
I think this roughly explains what each Norwood means:
NW1 - Full head of hair
NW2 - Widow's peak
NW3 - Receding hairline
NW4 - Balding
NW5 - Almost bald...
Well sh*t that means I'm a NW4 f*****g hell
Though in the first pic it still looks like the hair behind the diffused forelock is strong-ish, so I wouldn't say he's a NW6 yet there.
Yeah that's one indicator, although on a true NW7 the horseshoe has dipped really low as well, to only 2 inches...
Yeah, also if you're gonna have a large bald spot in the back I think having some recession looks more natural as well imo, a NW1 hairline with a gaping crown isn't very common (it does happen but it still looks kinda off).
It'd probably look better if the bald crown wasn't so big still, and beard hair just doesn't look that natural on the head, so he'd be better off only using grafts from the horseshoe. Though, a thing I don't get is that on all these NW7 transplants they only use 2k-3k grafts wtf? Obviously that...