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Questions about using Dialogs in android?

I'll get straight to the point. Dialog's confuse the hell out of me. Why? Because it seems as though there are 5 different ways on instantiating them, giving them a custom layout, and using them. To add insult to injury the documentation on them is very poor. so I'm going to post the main questions I have here, and hope you guys can clear some of the confusion for me.
Question One:
what is the Real Difference between Dialog, and DialogFragment?
Question Two:
why is it better to use onCreateView, rather than onCreateDialog?
furthermore, Whats the difference?
Question Three:
why not just do *Dialog dialog = new Dialog();* everytime i need one,
rather than subclass DialogFragment constantly?
I apologize if this thread may not seem like a good fit for the community, but please keep in mind these are very real, and un-answered questions. Of all the tutorials I've read, from slidenerd-to-vogella-to-Stack everything explains the How, but not Why, which is just as important, if not more. Thanks Guys!

The difference between them is that a Dialog can only show a custom view but has no means in itself for you to interact with it's views / widgets programmatically at the runtime of the Dialog (ie when it's shown). DialogFragment extends Fragment and has all capabilities and the lifecycle of a Fragment (or very similar to them when used as a dialog).
DialogFragment can also be used as a 'normal' fragment, which means you could use a DialogFragment to show a dialog on a tablet or have it live inside an activity (ie full-screen) on a phone.
If the DialogFragment is also to be used as a Fragment, it has to return a View via onCreateView, so you'll have to implement onCreateView anyway. You can probably avoid code repetition if you only implement onCreateView and not onCreateView and onCreateDialog. But I've never heard someone say that is is 'better to use onCreateView, rather than onCreateDialog'.
You don't have to subclass DialogFragment for most dialogs. To show a simple Dialog eg. asking the user a question of showing a little bit of information, you can instantiate a new Dialog() or use the DialogBuilder. I use DialogFragments only when there's some logic going on within the Dialog that I want to reside in it's own class and makes use of the DialogFragments lifecycle.

Why would I want to use DialogFragments over Regular Fragments in Android?

Surprisingly, I couldn't find any posts regarding this, so here we go:
Why would I want to use a DialogFragment over a simple Fragment in Android? What advantages does the DialogFragment have that I will miss out on if I just use a regular Fragment?
Might be worth mentioning that I intend to have a fully customized view inside it...
Thanks!

A DialogFragment is no other than a Fragment that looks and acts like a Dialog would. So whether or not you want to use it is entirely depended on what do you want to make out of it.
From my experience using DialogFragment, I tend to utilize it as a "detailed" view of a list item. The one that hovers on the list instead of covering it entirely (like a normal Fragment would) so that the user doesn't lose context.
So that's that; you might want to use it wherever you want to show a view which either depend or need to retain its' parent context.
p.s., Yes, you can even put a fully customized view in a DialogFragment.

Well, basically you have all features od a Dialog in a fragment.
For example the back is handled by the system, you can dismiss the dialog clicking outside the dialog view, you can set the dialog to be not cancellable. And yes, the look and feel is the same of the other dialogs.

Create a new DialogFragment from another DialogFragment instantiated in another context

I am developing an Android library to ask the users of an app to give a rating on the Play Store.
The UX of the library consists in a few dialogs. Depending on the answer to the first question I might need to dismiss the current dialog, to show another dialog or to take the user to the Play Store.
Everything works nice unless I rotate the screen in the middle of the process.
I tried to solve my issues with the use of fragments. With fragments I am not losing anymore the state of the dialogs with the rotation but I am having troubles instantiating the second DialogFragment. The problem is that, after a rotation, the context of the first DialogFragment is no more active and it has no way to retrieve the new context. That results in exceptions every time I try to instantiate the new DialogFragment.
Is there any way I could solve this issue?
Thinking again at the problem, it seems that my design choice was wrong but I am not very experienced in Android development. Every advice will be more than welcome.

You should be using the listener pattern. Define an interface in each dialog and send clicks back to the activity. Let it create the dialogs.
see here
Also, if you need a context in the fragments, just call getActivity(), don't create an unnecessary context variable that could later give back an activity that's already gone. I hope that helps. I can't give a better answer without some code to see what's going wrong in this specific situation.

Android Fragment Confusion

I have a question about the correct logical use of fragments in Android. I know that it was designed to be used to improve tablet experience, but does this imply that fragments should generally ONLY be used for this purpose? Or would it be poor development practice to use fragments as a replacement for a custom compound View?
For example, I am writing an app to keep tally. When the score sheet is produced, it creates a "ScoreCell," a custom compound control, for each player in a ScrollView. What I want to do(but don't see how as a View) is handle internal OnClickListeners that are activated by the containing activity: each ScoreCell has a TextView for the players' name, which I want to long-press to startActivityForResult() to pop open an input dialog to change the name of the ScoreCell. But seeing as the method for OnActivityResult() is unavailable in a View, would it be correct for me to instead make each ScoreCell a fragment?
Here is a picture of the activity to help understand the logic of what I need/am confused about

There are many questions in here, let me go through them.
No fragments are not meant just for tablet experience, in general they allow you to create more modular and adaptable layouts (think classes). They are extremely helpful in tablet layouts/landscape, but also give you reusable components.
At the same time, a fragment is not the right choice here... It is much easier to use a listview, coupled with a custom cell layout. Instead of using another activity to display a dialog simply call new Dialog() and dialog.show(). An activity should only be used as a dialog if it will be used by the user by a long period of time and provides a new "activity" (action)

Items in a list should not each be their own fragment, no. You can pop up a dialog without creating an entire Activity. Take a look at the documentation on AlertDialogs and DialogFragments for your dialogs and you can get the result from that.

How do replicate this android pop up

Can anyone tell me what control or how do you create the pop-up effect used in these images to display the legend?
The screenshots are taken from an app called FlyOKC.
Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.

This is not exactly a custom dialog. But, yes it is still a customized view. And it is more or less called Quick Action Dialog in android. I would suggest you to follow the tutorials below for generating an exactly same popover (or even better) with Android. Check the screenshot also.
http://www.londatiga.net/it/how-to-create-quickaction-dialog-in-android/
http://www.androidpatterns.com/uap_pattern/quick-actions (Pattern Reference)

That's certainly using a custom version of a dialog. The idea is to implement your layout in a xml and inflate it in a dialog. There's a lot of tutorials around, try that one.

Actually, that can be achieved by using RelativeLayout and switching the legend view's visible state between View.VISIBLE and View.GONE in button's click handler.
To get the exact animation you'll need to jump some hoops.
Here are related threads:
How does one Animate Layout properties of ViewGroups?
How do I animate View.setVisibility(GONE)
Also, I think another (and possibly easier) way would be to use Fragments API with transition effects, in which case this is the thread to read:
Animate the transition between fragments