I’m a dedicated logic user, have been since Logic Pro 8.
Firstly, it’ll open in whatever sample rate your system is configured to. It’s not more or less happy at 44.1 vs anything else, it’s just reading from Core Audio what the system/kernel sample rate is. As you noticed, it’ll change to the native sample rate of your files when you drag and drop if you tell it to, or you can configure the top panel to have access to sample rate changes. There are other ways to do this, but they all involve some jumping through hoops with audio/midi setup in Mac OS.
For a polywav like your zoom creates, logic can’t determine which tracks are stereo pairs. So just pan individual tracks hard left/right, and mute pairs as needed. You could also group them, and I believe there’s a way to properly join pairs into stereo tracks, though I’ve never dig into the documentation on how to do so since it’s never impacted my work flow.