remotely resetting ipad

I apologize but this is sort of a repost. I thought the previous question was solved, but it is not.

here's the situation:

I did a stupid thing — sold my 3rd gen wifi-only iPad and forgot to factory reset before mailing. I of course knew to do it, and thought of it several times, but just had too many things going on and was hurrying to get to post office before closing and I screwed up.

I have set up find my iphone to erase as soon as the ipad connects to internet, but have not set it as lost. There is a passcode, but it has probably not been set to erase after 10 wrong attempts.

question#1: The easiest thing to do for the new owner would be I give him my passcode, and he unlocks ipad. If I do this (after changing all my account passwords—icloud, google, email, etc), and I trust him to go directly to settings and connect to wifi, will it immediately erase once connected? The issue here is that activation lock keeps the ipad from being logged out of icloud even though I've changed my icloud password. So new owner will still have access to all personal info on the ipad. I just tested this with my ipad mini. It is allowing me to edit, delete notes and contacts. It just won't sync them to the cloud without the new password.
There's nothing of any interest to anyone aside from me on the ipad, but naturally the idea of someone being able to see all my notes and photos and address book is uncomfortable.

question #2: if I have new owner attempt wrong passcodes and it simply disables at 6 tries, the disable is only temporary and we will be able to try other strategies, right?

q3: if it does erase after 10 wrong passcodes, can the new owner then factory reset from itunes and it's like new? would the erase plus me removing it from my icloud account disable the activation lock?

q4: activation lock will keep recovery mode from working. is there any way I can faciliate getting around this?

I hope it's obvious from the above that I know the basics of dealing with a lost ipad, but this is not a basic lost/stolen situation.

Thanks!