1.) Emunand is for playing retail carts without having to update your sysnand and lose the ability to run known exploits. There are no publicly available "higher firmware requirement cfw's", and the only one(s) openly in development are anti piracy so don't get your hopes up too high about playing 7.x encrypted games (i.e. smash bros)
2.) yes, this is real, but does not work for games that are made with the 7.x sdk or w/e makes them 7.x encrypted. So basically it's for games which use a higher firmware than 4.5 but lower than 7.x, as far as I know. You can spoof your own games but it's fairly time consuming, although it's really the best option. Look for a tutorial here on gbatemp about converting .3ds to .cia, and that hsould teach you what you need to do to make your own .cias including region free or f/w spoofed .cias
3.) Don't tell anyone I told you, but there's this website called google.com - great place for finding anything!

 

You can play the legit version of ssb without flashcart, read this :
http://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-p...-without-gateway-mt-card-4-1-4-5-only.383990/