1. The point of "normalization" with regards to a BRDF is to ensure that the energy being reflected off a surface (radiant exitance) is less than or equal to the amount of energy that's hitting the surface (irradiance). If that inequality isn't true you've violated energy conservation, and it will possible for a surface to "gain" energy. Now keep in mind that doesn't mean that the energy reflecting off the surface has to be less than or equal to the intensity of an analytical light source, which seems to what you're thinking. The radiant exitance is calclulated by integrating the exit radiance for all possible viewing directions about the hemisphere surrounding a point's surface normal. When you calculate the specular reflection for a surface in a shader, you're just calculating the radiance for one possible viewing direction. So for instance if you have a directional light of intensity 1.0 that's pointing straight at a surface, the resulting irradiance is equal to 1.0 * N dot L, which is 1.0. With a normalized specular term you will actually get values that are way higher than 1.0 for certain viewing directions, however for most viewing directions you will get a much lower values. But if it's properly normalized, you should end up with a value less than 1.0 if you were to integrate the specular result for all possible viewing directions.

If you're not familiar with this yet, I would suggest reading the relevant sections of Real-Time Rendering, 3rd edition and Physically-Based Rendering. There's Principles of Digital Image Synthesis (which is free), which has an overview of radiometry and the relevant integrals in chapter 13.

2. Real metallic surfaces don't have a "diffuse" response to light. Their response is purely specular, although it may require multiple specular lobes to properly approximate the real-world response. To render this sort of material and have it look good, you really need to include specular reflections from the entire environment and not just from analytically light sources. Otherwise it will just be black with a few highlights, which doesn't look very metallic. Typically games will use reflection probes stored as cubemaps to approximate environment reflections, perhaps pre-convolved with a kernel that's meant to approximate the specular BRDF. For low-intensity specular values, you may want to consider rescaling the texture value in your shader. So for instance if you were to multiply by 0.04, then you specular intensity of 0.02 would be represented by a texture value of 0.5 and you'd have a lot of precision available for small variations.

1. The point of "normalization" with regards to BRDF is to ensure that the energy being reflected off a surface (radiant exitance) is less than or equal to the amount of energy that's hitting the surface (irradiance). If that inequality isn't true you've violated energy conservation, and it will possible for a surface to "gain" energy. Now keep in mind that doesn't mean that the energy reflecting off the surface has to be less than or equal to the intensity of an analytical light source, which seems to what you're thinking. The radiant exitance is calclulated by integrating the exit radiance for all possible viewing directions about the hemisphere surrounding a point's surface normal. When you calculate the specular reflection for a surface in a shader, you're just calculating the radiance for one possible viewing direction. So for instance if you have a directional light of intensity 1.0 that's pointing straight at a surface, the resulting irradiance is equal to 1.0 * N dot L, which is 1.0. With a normalized specular term you will actually get values that are way higher than 1.0 for certain viewing directions, however for most viewing directions you will get a much lower values. But if it's properly normalized, you should end up with a value less than 1.0 if you were to integrate the specular result for all possible viewing directions.

2. Real metallic surfaces don't have a "diffuse" response to light. Their response is purely specular, although it may require multiple specular lobes to properly approximate the real-world response. To render this sort of material and have it look good, you really need to include specular reflections from the entire environment and not just from analytically light sources. Otherwise it will just be black with a few highlights, which doesn't look very metallic. Typically games will use reflection probes stored as cubemaps to approximate environment reflections, perhaps pre-convolved with a kernel that's meant to approximate the specular BRDF. For low-intensity specular values, you may want to consider rescaling the texture value in your shader. So for instance if you were to multiply by 0.04, then you specular intensity of 0.02 would be represented by a texture value of 0.5 and you'd have a lot of precision available for small variations.