on the proton encryption, i did know about this but does that apply to proton-to-proton, proton-to-NonProton, or both? if you have details on this let me know.

As I know it applies to both. Formerly they were asking (among other things) about the titles of your latest emails for account recovery. (after I have put all the links here I realized that these don’t give a details on whether this also applies to inter-proton messages…)

A few sources:

proton.me/…/proton-mail-encryption-explained

Subject lines and recipient/sender email addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted.

www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/…/eiphhs7/?c…

…stackexchange.com/…/why-is-some-meta-data-not-en…

either way the fact that they dont makes me feel that proton is a similar honeypot to signal and telegram, where they make a compromise with the five eyes, to give them metadata even if actual contents are safe. metadata can be much more powerful than contents often times

Yeah, might as well be. But if it is, I’m afraid we won’t get to know for a few decades, if ever. And I think it’s still better than the alternatives… the alternative email providers, that is.
If it comforts you, in their reddit comment I linked they mention (in 2019…) that there’s a proposal they support for openpgp to be able to have an encrypted subject line.