For Item 1: Dates can only be in ISCO8601 format (yyyy-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ss.SSSZ or yyyy-MM-dd)
If your dates are coming in differently from your authoritative source, you can use a transform to set the data into the expected format in the standard attribute.
For Item 2: For custom date attributes, it seems like ISC only treats custom fields as dates when the last part of the technical name is “DateType”. So, in your case, you would want the technical name to be endDateFormattedDateType. See this discussion: