/3/ - 3DCG

Could someone explain or point out some tutorial series on animations/NLA in Blender? I created some actions for a game I'm making and I wanted to see how they blend together, looping them and stuff.
My problem is the NLA editor is an absolute clusterfuck of nonsense and it doesn't set the clip length the way I want it to.

Here's an example:
8 frames walk cycle that's actually 10 frames long (frame 0 is T pose and frame 9 is just frame 1). I pressed the shield/fake user shit, I stashed it as a strip.
I add it in a NLA track. Since the action loads up as 10 frames long (default start/end is 0 and 9), I set the Action CLIP to start in frame 1 and end in frame 8, then adjust Action STRIP to 1/8. This loops okay.
I want to see how it loops twice, so I set the Scale to 1 and Repeat to 2 in Action CLIP since I want it to use my keyframes.
For some reason, forcing the scale to 1, makes the ACTIVE strip to end in frame 15 instead of frame 16. If I change it to end in frame 16, it adjusts the scale to 1.07x, which readjusts some timing and makes it loop awfully.

I feel stupid asking this, but if it the first repeat starts in frame 1 and ends in frame 8, shouldn't the second repeat end in frame 16? Not according to Blender.

Also, if I add several clips to the NLA Track, I can't rearrange them which is absolutely stupid. None of this makes sense.