Questions about competitive aoe3 scene

I have recently played aoe3 back in the good ol' days, and I mostly watch competitive aoe2 on twitch/YouTube. Because of Escape AoE, a little bit of aoe3 started to leak into my feed and recently I've started watching competitive aoe3 as well (mostly the recent Escape AoE tournament). But I am not super familiar with competitive aoe3, so I have a few questions. Bear in mind that I come from the aoe2 community.

1. Who is TheViper (pick your favorite top 3 player) of AoE3? After watching many aoe3 1v1 matchups, I am familiar with a lot of names, but I don't have a sense of who the top 1/3/5 players are.
2. Is 1v1 the most popular format in competitive aoe3? It's similar in aoe2, but there's a fair bit of 2v2 and up. Or is it because EscapeAoE mostly cast 1v1s? If so, which casters cast 2v2s and up?
3. Which civs are universally recognized to be OP and which are very bad? For example, I tend to see French, British, Ottomans, Indians and Germans in most of the matchups, but never Chinese. Why?