Controlling Access to Products via Subscription

I am hoping to get some advice on how to setup a store that includes a membership model. I have several thousand digital products. Right now there are two main types of products, ProductA and ProductB. I would like some of both products be to available for purchase to anyone, but the majority of ProductA will be available (free) to members of the site. I will also have premium content on my website that is available only to members.

I am thinking of using Akeeba subscriptions to handle the membership part. I will use it to protect the premium content. The first question is how to control access to ProductA that are available only to members. I want to manage all the products and the membership purchase through hikashop. I want non-members to see the product and know they can get it only via membership. I want members to be able to download it.

Should I put some custom fields on ProductA and then modify the templates to handle this?

Another tricky aspect is limiting the number of downloads of ProductA a member can make. When I sell a membership for example, I would like them to have access to content for 30 days and be able to download 10 ProductA in the 30 days. To do this I figure I will have to hook into the order callback onAfterOrderCreate. I will have to track the number of downloads in a custom table or on a custom user field. When they use up all their download quota, I will change their subscription status from PremiumAndDownloads to PremiumOnly.

One big question is if ProductA is free and downloadable to a member, is an order even generated? Is there a way to know the download was performed?

Does this sound like a reasonable plan or is there some other approach using hikashop built-in functionality, like discounts, to get this to work?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

Cheers!

Thanks for the detailed answer. I am looking forward to getting started with hikashop!