There has been little difference in the last few years between -release+patches and -stable. That does not mean that there may not be significant differences once more. It depends on the patches and their severity or audience.
For the purposes of the rest of your questions, you can consider -release, -release+patches, and -stable as equivalent.
No library changes, structural changes, or functional changes are permitted in any errata patch or -stable patch. You are safe, therefore, intermixing -release and -stable ports/packages with -release,-release+patches, or -stable.
If you cannot wait for a -stable version of a Firefox release to be built, you can always attempt to backport a -current version yourself, if you have the technical skills. Note that creating a backport may not be technically possible; there may be some dependency on a newer library version within that hypothetical Firefox release or its dependency chain.
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