Alot of sam DID atleast use shields with the bug with Spark Spear or w/e it was, where you could wear a shield, they would equip it for llving cap, and wear shield so you dont take AS much damage
Samurai's can wear a lot of types of shields. Their shield skill is crap (usually half--thx to a subbed stat: my lvl 17 sam shield skill was something around 25). It would be hard to find a Samurai that decided to drop the Great Katana just to go sword-and-shield. Pick up Paladin for that. But yea, Samurai's can wear shields.
Wrong. You cannot under any circumstances synth CP items. If you look at the recipes for some of the other CP Items +1 and +2, you will notice that they are made out of the original CP items.