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To help sculpt your search engine results, I would suggest using anchor text on the page you don't want to appear in SERPs, with a link to the page you do wish to appear. If the search term you are using is blue widgets, then provide a link from the old page to the new page using "blue widgets" as the anchor text. This method will send a strong signal to search engines as to which page from your site should be returned for the given term. Follow up by ensuring the target page is optimized for the term as well.

The 301 should be outside the <ifmodule>. Maybe you could post the other 301 redirects and the one which isn't working here.</ifmodule> Creating a new index.html and redirecting from it would give you a 302 or even a meta-redirect, which in regard to seo is not recommended.

there should always be one way search bots can crawl your site to get to the content - even the deepest content. If you've got that in place, any other path can be noindexed, or index/followed.

For character sake I would opt to not use the www and have it redirected. But once you have decided make sure you are consistent. You can advertise with either, it's more the actual linking that makes the difference.