All your advice on this is good. New performers, however, seldom have a mentor/performer with enough experience to lead them through the jungle of agent/predators effectively, and often have to depend on speaking with talent that agent is currently representing. This talent probably isn't going to express warnings yet.

I would like to see something for talent along the lines of what pornstarperformance.com provides for producers, whereas talent can inform other talent on the reliability and behaviors of agents and producers. If there's a site like this for talent, I haven't seen it, but I think it would be reasonable for one to exist as a tool for them.