The MVC (Model-View-Controller) template is most suitable for creating a web API project in ASP.NET Core. It's specifically designed for building web applications and APIs, providing the necessary structure and components for handling HTTP requests and responses in a RESTful manner.

ASP.NET Core MVC (Model-View-Controller) is built upon the MVC architectural pattern. This pattern separates the application into three interconnected components: Model (data and business logic), View (UI presentation), and Controller (handles user input and controls the flow).

The primary difference between conventional routing and attribute routing in ASP.NET Core MVC is that conventional routing uses route templates defined in the "Startup.cs" file, while attribute routing defines routes using attributes directly on controller actions or methods. Conventional routing is configuration-based, while attribute routing is declarative and provides more flexibility in defining routes.

Unit testing is a best practice for ensuring the reliability and correctness of your code. It involves writing small, isolated tests for individual units of code to validate their behavior. Code obfuscation is used for security but not for bug prevention, while copy-pasting code and ignoring error messages are counterproductive practices.

As a beginner, you would likely start with Visual Studio Community Edition for developing ASP.NET Core applications. It provides a comprehensive development environment with a wide range of features and tools tailored for .NET development, making it suitable for beginners.

The Class Library template in ASP.NET Core is intended for creating reusable class libraries. When you want to encapsulate functionality and share it across multiple projects, such as other ASP.NET Core applications, this template is the right choice. It allows you to create libraries that can be easily referenced and reused.

In ASP.NET Core, you can use the {parameter:regex} constraint to specify a regular expression pattern that a route parameter must match for the route to be selected. This is helpful when you need to apply specific validation rules to route parameters.

The LockoutMaxFailedAccessAttempts option in ASP.NET Core Identity determines the number of invalid access attempts allowed before locking out a user account. After exceeding this limit, the user's account will be temporarily locked to prevent unauthorized access.

Short-circuiting a request in ASP.NET Core middleware means halting the request processing at a specific middleware point and preventing it from continuing further down the pipeline. This can be useful for tasks like authentication, where if authentication fails, further processing can be skipped.

The [NotMapped] attribute in Entity Framework Core is used to specify that a property of an entity should not be mapped to a database column. This is useful when you have properties in your entity that are not supposed to be stored in the database.