Is there a good tool out there that can allow me to see exactly see what a mod does, allow me to do small edits easily and most importantly: let me quickly see if there are conflicts with other mods?

TES4Edit and it's brothers FO3- & FNVEdit served this function for me for their respective games, but if a version of it has been released for Skyrim. I haven't found it.

Not yet, but it's coming I believe.

TES5Gecko is currently being worked on and we'll probably have an alpha version in a month or 2, TES5Edit is probably more like 6+ months away. These dates are subject to change due to random RL events