Leave the zoom at 1.0, use EdgePeek for menus: middle mouse button or left gamepad stick button (or right, can’t remember currently). EdgePeek temporarily switches to a cinema like view, perfect for menus and cutscenes. Also in the help, ‘Quickstart Guide’ this time :).
You shouldn’t have to tweak much in most officially supported games. A lot of potential grief with vorpX stems from the wrong assumption that the many options available to tweak mean one has to actually do that, which most of the time is not the case. The defaults are usually pretty good. Especially as a beginner you can fairly easily break something by tweaking too much. So be careful.
Hands: try a higher player/weapon FOV on the DirectVR page of the vorpX menu. That’s a bit of a general issue though with many games. Hands/weapons are often rendered with different camera settings than the world to look good on the monitor. Can’t be fully avoided in many cases.
While I’m at it: if you want to customize hotkeys (including the EdgePeek key), you can do that in the config app.