As for me, my Blue Truck has 3.55s and it shifts much differently than my Bronco with 4.10s did. It's even the same transmission, clutch, pressure plate, and SMF flywheel. With my Bronco, I could just get rolling to maybe 3-4 MPH and shift quickly into second. The Bronco didn't mind that at all. The Blue Truck, on the other hand, doesn't like this at all. What it likes is to be rolling at 12+ MPH, then I have to hold the speed for a few seconds (maybe 10 seconds) and then shift it into second. The rest of the shifts go easier, but it still prefers higher RPM shifting. When I shift, I don't try to speed shift like it's a race car. It's not. I let the transmission decide when to go into and out of gears. I'm just there to guide it along. During down shifts, I'll usually try to RPM match the engine and transmission if I'm going down through the gears. It seems to like this better. Now, if I'm coming up to a stop sign on the highway without a lowered speed limit (like going into a town), I'll usually use the brakes to lessen my speed and then an around 40MPH or so, I'll clutch and shift into neutral, coming to a complete stop in neutral with the clutch pedal out. When taking off from a complete stop, out of habit, I'll shift into second and then up into first before letting out the clutch. My first manual transmission car had reverse all the way to the left and forward. It was supposed to have a detent to prevent getting to reverse without pushing down on the shifter, but that quit working nor long after I started driving the car. I got tired of going into reverse when trying to hit first so I developed the second-into-first habit and still do this 30+ years later. Now upshifting these trucks (it's been long enough that I don't remember how the 4 speeds act so I'm only talking about the ZF5s here) is a totally different procedure than any other manual transmission car or truck that I've ever come across. They way that I learned to upshift these back in the early 90's is to almost completely let out on the clutch pedal before pushing down on the throttle. You want to have little to no throttle input when the clutch pedal is fully released. If you do this, the upshift will be smooth without and extra jerking. Much throttle at all when the pedal is released seems to make the truck jerk forward some. I guess I basically shift like an old granny, but my truck still goes wherever I want it to without any strange clutch or transmission issues.
As what gear to start out from a standstill from, this is my example. While I was working on these for a living, the shop owner had a scrap iron business. For a couple of years, his daily work truck was a 1995 F350 CC Dually with a PSD and a ZF5. At about 205,000 miles, his dual mass flywheel went bad so naturally, I got to replace it. He pulled around a big front end loader (I have no idea what I was these days) on a goose neck trailer. He had a John Deere tractor fuel tank in the bed for extra fuel, and he often carried around a fork load of scrap metal on the trailer as well. I know that the entire rig weighed well over 30,000 Lbs. While I was replacing the flywheel, the clutch looked like it had at least half of it's life left. His theory on driving this was "I take off in first gear like you're supposed to do and I don't try to drive it like it's a G** D*** race car!". I did learn something from him.