I imagine you will need to pose the body mesh the way you want to with the armature and then import the props and combine them with the body mesh to make one mesh to print it. But, mind you, I'm no 3D printing expert.
Yes, notifications are the best way to communicate stuff like this from the simulation to the GUI (and it works just as @phosit said).
What kind of calculations? A "tick" in the GUI happens for each rendered frame, so the tick rate won't go up if you increase the sim rate (in fact, it'll probably go down a bit, since the game is busier with the simulation and has less time for rendering).