cousin_it,
I suspect the 'standard questions' of metaethics are confusing to you because you have the admirable tendency to be confused by things that are confused. Most of these categories and questions are confused, and I plan to dissolve rather than solve most of them in my metaethics sequence.
And after those questions are dissolved, I plan to explain what I think are the open and difficult questions that remain in metaethics.
lukeprog gave a list of metaethics questions here:
Most of these questions make no sense to me. I imagine that the moral intuitions in my brain come from a special black box within it, a "morality core" whose outputs I cannot easily change. (Explaining how my "morality core" ended up a certain way is a task for evo psych, not philosophy.) Or I can be more enlightened and adopt Nesov's idea that the "morality core" doesn't exist as a unified device, only as an umbrella name for all the diverse "reasons for action" that my brain can fire. Either perspective can be implemented as a computer program pretty easily, so I don't feel there's any philosophical mystery left over. All we have is factual questions about how people's "morality cores" vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?