I cannot figure out how to restrict drop caps to the first paragraph.
I haven't used drops caps in Scribus, but likely you need different paragraph styles with and without drop caps.
When creating styles, I usually start with the body text style, then almost all other styles are based on that one and get added properties.
For example in some cases using the body text immedately after a heading does not work well, or needs to be a bit different, so a separate style is needed for that.
I don't have any good tips about fonts, but there are probably web pages out there giving examples of alternatives.
A good font manager is very useful, where you can group and categorize your fonts. I seem to have Nexusfont installed, I think I installed that one efter upgrading to Windows 10, because the program I used before did not work under Windows 10.
With a font manager you can make it so you don't have to see the fonts you want to avoid bu can't uninstall.
One thing to consider is that if you mave massive blocks of text, a font with a small x-height helps a normal reader to see the words (a lot of people actually read words as images, and a small x-height with strong ascenders and descenders helps that). But people with reading issues like dyslexia need other types of fonts.
So fonts is an even bigger area than layout...