I never really had what I would say is major pain. Maybe I just expect that there are many things that could be far worse. For the most part, any kind of stabbing pain was gone after a day or two and it felt like a general numbness and dull aching for the rest of the week until my surgery. Unless I moved wrong, then stabbing again. I think I may have taken something the first night to get to sleep, but otherwise preferred to stay off of the narcotics.

Depends on how badly it is broken. I'm not a doc so I am not going to give you advice based on your x-ray (although I do have an opinion). They seem to talk about displacement (how far the bone is out of alignment) and the length of the break itself. My break was the long way across the bone and the displacement was huge, so pretty much everyone who looked at it said surgery without batting an eye.

Pretty much. I had some swelling and soreness at the incision for about a week, but that was the worst of it. The nice thing about the surgery is that it is "fixed" immediately and you can use it while it is healing. My doc said it was stronger than the original and I didn't have to worry about damaging it by using it. I could do whatever I could tolerate without worrying about setting myself back. The downsite is that I still have this stupid plate in my shoulder and it's annoying to wear backbacks, and I can see it's lumpy mass clearly through my skin.

Edit: and I was riding again within a week of the surgery. There is a thread on here about it somewhere.