6) how do you point the laser at the moon reflector when you can't see anything that small on the moon?
Your personal incredulity is not persuasive. Many people have personally witnessed it done at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas and other locations. One way is to use your telescope control system. Tell it to center on a certain place on the moon. Its internal model of the sky can understand where the moon is and the servos will move the scope. I've seen this done with amateur and small professional telescopes. The computing power needed is trivial.
7) if all that works, you're still only getting a couple photons coming in. How do you know your couple photons from the 50 million ambient photons coming from the very bright moon? A photon is a photon.
Your personal incredulity is not persuasive. When photons of the expected characteristics are detected in statistically significant amounts at the expected time following a laser pulse directed at the reflectors, they are reflected from the moon. If you have another hypothesis to explain the experimental results, we are all ears.