It's really just for aesthetics; I have virtually no fingernails and generally use a thumbpick so all my scratch-plates are pretty much unblemished. I just prefer the look with it (today).
You can easily stuff all the electrics through the pickup hole, so you've got the luxury of being able to wire up and test everything outside the guitar. But don't forget that you should run an earth wire to the rear block to make contact with the metal of the trapeze tailpiece so the strings get grounded. A hole will need to be drilled to do this. I suggest slightly above the hole you'll need to drill in the trapeze for the strap button (they never seem to be pre-drilled).
To avoid making that ground wire a lot longer than necessary, you can make it shorter so that it's still long enough to reach the end block with some slack, then drill the hole and feed some cotton through and remember to tie it to the ground wire so that it can be pulled through once the pots are in position. I would suggest drilling out about 5mm with a wider drill so there's just enough space to knot the ground wire to stop it being pulled back into the body, but so the trapeze can sit flush on top of the hole on top of the splayed end of the wire.
Alternatively you can do it the other way; fix the end of the ground wire first by the trapeze, then leave enough slack so that you can pull a pot and the ground wire through an f-hole, and solder it to the back of that pot.
Whichever way, you'll need enough slack in the ground wire so that you can still pull the pot it's connected to out through an f-hole to de-solder it if you ever need to replace any of the components.
You could have a very long ground wire and both fix it at the trapeze end first and also pre-solder it, but that's a lot of wire which will flap around inside, and may end up visible through the lower f-hole.
Also note that the Stu-Mac wiring diagram has omitted the ground wire between the back of the volume and tone pot. Naturally you had spotted this, but without it, the tone control won't work and the pickup will sound brighter than it should without the extra low pass filtering of the tone cap+pot.
Indeed. In the photo you've only got one connection to the tone pot via the orange drop cap. And you need two paths to get any current flow and a signal. The cap is connected to the signal on the volume pot, but it needs a connection to ground otherwise no signal can go through the cap and the tone pot to ground. You could take the back of the pot directly to another ground connection on the jack, but to the back of the volume pot is more common.
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