User blog comment:TonyMutu/Thoughts on 2003 anime/@comment-1618178-20130109041552/@comment-1618178-20130109210502

Oh, yeah!!! I totally forgot those existed!! God!! lol

Those episodes are lame! Totally out of purpose. ¬¬'

But, about your questions, many things in FMA 1 are left "unexplained" because they couldn't disclose some informations from further in the FMA story and many others were changed so that the manga would keep its "originality" and "freshness" when it got released. That is one of the bigger problems of making an Anime of an ongoing Manga. So, yeah... there's no real explanation or 'amendments" for the points you brought up. They're merely incoherences risen up due to the peculiarities of FMA 1.