I noticed quite a few examples using SimpleStream. When actually should I use SimpleStream?
SimpleStream is my way to unify access to resources, so that i don't have to care if they are located in a jar or somewhere in the file system. It's just something that eases development for me. If you don't need it that way, then you don't need SimpleStream.
Do textures compress in memory when not in use?
Simple one: No.
Has the hold down mouse button been fixed in lwjgl? As in do I need to do this anymore:
That's nothing that has to be fixed in LWJGL. It just that i didn't want the mouse click from some "click to play" action to trigger the mouse click event in game, so i'm waiting for the button being released.
Should I use Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().sync()? It had no effect for me, but I hear that Linux needs it.
For hardware mode, this isn't needed for sure, because LWJGL's native display has nothing to do with awt. For the software renderer...no idea. I never used it IIRC and never had a need to.
What would be the best way to do blur? Say for if object is speeding (single object), or if a player is drunk (whole screen, ignoring GUI).
To blur the whole screen in software, you can write a pixel based blur filter for that. It might be a bit slow though. For hardware mode, you can (ab)use the BloomGLProcessor in procs. Look out for the method setCombining(). About motion blur...no real idea.
Hardware mode targets what OpenGL version? aka does it work on OpenGL 1.1?
More like 1.3 with feature support up to 2.0. It might work to a degree with 1.1, but you'll have a hard time finding some hardware/drivers that implement these 13 years old specs only. 1.3 is minimum even for the crappiest chipsets.