The stone will be fine kept in your oven all the time, but there are trade-offs. The biggie is that your oven will preheat slower than you're currently used to--potentially quite a bit if you get a large or heavy stone. And you will really need to make sure that the stone has reached the desired oven temperature (by preheating longer) or the way things cook in your oven will be thrown off. The oven may claim to be fully preheated before the stone is really up to temperature because the thermostat just measures the air temperature, which can be higher than the stone, or even the sides of the oven for a while.
The upside is that your oven will retain heat better and generally be more even in its heat. So if you are willing to properly preheat that stone, you'll probably benefit in the long run.
As you've divined already, you'll have to put it on one of your oven racks as low as it will go toward the bottom of the oven. You don't want to put it right on the coils, but you want it as close as it will go. This means you'll have one less rack available to you. In practice this may not matter much, but it's a thing.
I wouldn't recommend putting a pan directly on the stone, but that's because it would completely change how heat gets to the pan. When a pan is on a rack, there's heated air circulating around from all sides. If it sits on a preheated stone the pan now has direct heat conducted to the bottom--which will change how things cook, and many things you'd cook in the oven don't want that direct heat.
Broil mode should be fine with the stone in the oven. I wouldn't want to put a cold stone right up by the broiler as the thermal shock might crack it, but with it at the bottom of the oven there should be no issues, even if the stone isn't heated up.
Mid height for cakes in non-convection ovens, slightly above mid height for thin cakes, top for cookies. In a convection oven it doesn't matter because the airflow distributes heat evenly throughout the oven's volume.
Best Answer
Heat transfer is via
You don't have any conduction as you are not touching the heating element
The top element has direct radiant exposure to the cake so it will crust the top surface. Can use the top element (broil) to brown meat.
From the bottom there is radiant energy to the bottom so that will crust the bottom but to a lower extent as it is shielded by the cake pan.
Convection will provide the most even heat.
On the third rack use a smaller empty pan or baking stone to shield the second from most of radiant heat from the bottom but not block circulation. Preheat, cook on second shelf, and only use the bottom element.