nostr:npub159fznm25ns4jnkgha5uqw0h8hfzy3f5zjqel3xxt75zq0aldl2fsp9vg75 
To point 4: A decent general purpose bike will be able to handle offroading perfectly well. I know this because I grew up doing just that. You don't need a specialized mountain bike, you just need a bike that's not a dedicated street bike with skinny wheels. Skinny wheels suck anyways, even a little bit of gravel on the road is enough to make them slip to the point of being unsafe. A bigger issue is how bikes handle snow and especially ice. In that they don't. Every time you see someone riding a bike in show it's old hard packed snow that is probably less than a foot deep. That's effectively the same terrain as sand on rock, if even better than that. To use a bike in winter as general purpose transportation it has to be able to handle multiple inches (up to a foot even!) of fresh powder on top of multiple feet of old snow and sheets of black ice randomly distributed across the pavement.