Understanding the hog's foot

[mills]

There's definately some foolish noob questions to follow... you've been warned.

I've been looking at two versions of the hog's foot I found, and was wondering about some of the differences between them.  The first is similar to the amz schematic but without a pot anywhere. 

On the AMZ version there is a 100K volume pot before the output of the circuit, but on the other version there's no volume control, but rather a 27K resistor and a 10k pot in series at the input of the circuit. 

(I know that Dragonfly removed may of his layouts, if this shouldn't be reposted from Richard Boop's gallery please let me know and I'll take it down with my apollogies) What would be the reason for doing things this way?  Would I be correct in thining that it basically controlls the size of the signal to be amplified, rather than the size of the amplified signal (as in the standard volume pot)?  Would it also alter the cutoff of the lowpass filter as it was turned, or would the resistance in the low pass filter be too variable with its location in one's signal path (after a guitar or effect)?  Finally, if this configuration is used, where would one put a pull down resistor (to help with bypass pops), or is that even necessary/possible in this circuit?

Now 2 generic and even more basic questions.  First, why the huge value on the electrolytic input and output caps?  I realize that this is a bass booster, but I thought that even 1uf would be more than sufficient to pass most audio frequencies...  (I assume that electrolytic isn't crucial either).  Second, if one wanted a variable low pass and used a pot between 2 capacitors as shown in the wiki faq section, how does the resistance interact with what is already there... in other words, to get the same effect as a typical hog's foot, will the .1uf capacitors value need to change because of the resistance or does the pot simply control how much of the signal goes to which capacitor?

Thanks a bunch if you even read a part of that, thats about all for random questions for a while...  thoughts on any and all of the questions are greatly appreciated.