Would you mind dropping us your configuration file? (obviously with a blanked password)
(I thought only 8 were allowed out?).
That's a hardcoded value, but I believe you can increase it if you added nodes with
addnode in your bitcoin.conf.
Is outgoing connection for me to get new block information from other nodes and is incoming connection for me to broadcast my own transactions out there if I were to use my full node with my hardware wallet?
You can both broadcast transactions and get block information by not accepting incoming connections. The nodes that accept those are the ones the network lives from. For instance, when you want to sync your node, they'll send you the blocks. The network couldn't be consisting of nodes that accept only outgoing transactions. Those are mostly ran for personal reasons.
(Such as for privacy)I'm not 100% sure of the above part, so please, correct me if I've written something false.