Yes, everyone immediately thinks 3d and 3dsmax when the term render is used. To render something in the graphics sense here is to represent something as in a painting, drawing, photoshop, or 3d graphics. If you are just sketching it out on paper, you are indeed rendering it. It's just that now everyone associates render with 3d because of all the awesome 3d renders we see. If it was representative of only 3d scenes and stuff, then it wouldn't be called 3d rendering. You would not need the "3d" adjective to describe what type of rendering you are doing if rendering was only for 3d.
No, I never did and there are no screenshots as I did not started with chrome and bling, but real function like physics
There is some boat mod also under work, I found out, it uses really tires, but those are invisible, can't get tires for flying monkeys how ever, would need some propulsion and there is no known way to get propulsion, but it has aerophysics and in theory it should be able to fly more than few hops if there would be some aero foils and propulsion.