Yet another first for AG, but questions

Well, I am midway through my first AG brew.

I am doing an Irish Red Ale.

Did the conversion part and am now boiling. I gathered up around 6.5 gal of wort, then ran off the rest into another pot and am boiling that too (about 1.5 gal, figure I'll do an 1 gal batch in a jug for fun). Maybe I'm greedy?

I'm curious... is the purpose of the boil to?
1 - set bitterness with hops
2 - reduce the volume to desired (in this case, 5.5 gal)

The HLT/Sparge were not smooth. I had water set to the strike temp, but then my grain didn't hit the desired temp and I had to add about 1 gal boiling water and only increased 1 or 2 deg. Is that normal?

The boil is doing well and smells great. I will go through the typical calculations of efficiency and post my findings.

Stay tuned...

Boil is to set the bitterness as you put it and boil off excess water. You won't get the efficiency your looking for if you don't boil off. It takes an hour to get the full bitterness flavor from your hops.

Yes for both of them

If you are collecting more running than you need be careful you don't extract tannins. Best not to let the last runnings drop below 1006. (Corrected for temp)

I think my last runnings were around 1.020 (corrected for temp) so I wasn't worried about tannins.

The boil will also sterilize your wort. If it's not a really hoppy beer, I'll just boil for 45 minutes and increase the hops to compensate for lost IBUs.