Hello @jeremy and welcome to the community! These are totally normal questions, don't feel too bad 
For your filter question, there are a couple of ways to do this - the easiest for you is probably going to indeed be querying JSON with SQL. We use an open source package called AlaSQL to power this – and the syntax to reference a nested field is actually -> not .. So if you wanted to filter for records where creator.name = "Jeremy" you'd probably want to try something like WHERE creator->name = 'Jeremy'. Let me know if this works!
For your pagination question - what do you mean by display one row per page? Per table page?