Just a thought, but if you enter a PIN that doesn't meet the minimum requirements (must be at least 6 characters, Admin PIN must be at least 8 characters), it won't count as a failed PIN attempt.
OpenPGP on the YubiKey 4 and the YubiKey NEO has a PIN and an Admin PIN. If you lock out the PIN, you can still reset the PIN by providing the Admin PIN (12345678, by default). It's similar to PIN/PUK with PIV, if you're familiar.
The YubiKey 4 has no knowledge of "invert LED."
1) The Personalization Tool has a warning when attempting to overwrite slot 1 that it contains a Yubico OTP credential and the action cannot be undone. Salesforce is the only service that currently accepts Yubico OTP but doesn't accept "vv" credentials.
2) If the Admin PIN is locked, yes, that is correct. The OpenPGP applet follows these standards -
http://g10code.com/docs/openpgp-card-2.0.pdf3) There is no counter, so yes it's
possible to brute force it. When an access code is set, this is written to the configuration log file that is automatically generated by the Personalization Tool.
4) That is correct, the flag has to be set initially when programming a credential.