I can't speak to your specific flour but I have worked with coarsely ground whole wheat flour.
My standard bread recipes required quite a bit more kneading than usual. Additionally I had to work with them while they were still quite sticky to eventually get them to an elastic consistency.
I use a stand mixer to do the kneading for me- I'm afraid that it would be quite a mess doing it by hand. Remember that, when forming gluten, you can always trade work for time. If you can't find finer flour then I would recommend kneading the dough as much as you are able, let it rest for 15 minutes so the proteins relax, and then knead it again and see if you can't get the consistency you want without kneading all day.
Make sure the flour isn't so coarse, or has shards or bran, that would actually cut the gluten and prevent it from forming sheets. If this is the case then I don't know if you could make bread out of it predominantly. Perhaps if it were soaked overnight as in a poolish?
I mill my own flour to the finest possible setting and this seems to produce a much better textured bread.
As for the lack of rising and yeast- it is the same problem. Yeast are perfectly happy eating damaged starch in your flour. Adding sugar wouldn't necessarily help. If your dough was not elastic and failed your window pane test then there is nothing to really hold the structure of the bread. Your yeast may have been going crazy and there was just no balloon for them to blow up.
These are two related, but different products.
Gluten is protein that is formed from two pre-cursor proteins, glutanin and gliaden, found in wheat flour in the presence of water and under enzymatic activity.
It forms resilient stretchable networks which give yeast raised bread its structure.
Whole wheat flour is... well... whole wheat berries, ground up. It is mostly starch, but contains all glutenin, gliaden, and the necessary enzyme to create gluten, which forms naturally when the flour is moistened, if given long enough or kneaded to accelerate the process. However, even a very "strong" flour (bread flour) will have no more than about 10%-15% percent protein by weight, so it cannot form more than that amount of gluten.
Vital wheat gluten is essentially concentrated, powdered gluten, without the rest of the parts of the wheat berry.
They are not freely interchangeable, as the gluten does not bring the starch, bran, and other components that flour does. You may, in specific recipes, be able to use just gluten, but not in the general case. And even if substitution is possible, you would have to determine the correct ratio to achieve the desired outcome.
Using vital wheat gluten in lieu of whole wheat flour, in most applications, will either fail completely (no thickening from starch, as in a gravy), or be dense and rubbery, and practically unpalatable (as in a bread).
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Some forms of wheat are suitable for immediate cooking in a similar way to rice, such as Bulghur. This is traditional in much of the Middle East, and has been par-cooked prior to sale.
Cracked wheat is also available, but requires longer cooking. Note that terms overlap and even manufacturers can be vague. Whole wheat seeds do exist, sold for sprouting; it's not clear to me whether you could cook these directly but they'd take a long time if so.
Pasta is a traditional staple food in some parts of the world, and perfectly suitable for eating every day. Some dried pastas have nothing but wheat in them. Couscous, like many kinds of pasta, is made from pure wheat, but it's more absorbent and can be treated rather like rice and served with stew on top, or cold as a form of salad. It's an important part of the diet in some North African countries.
Bread is also an everyday (or even every meal) food in many places. These staple breads tend to be rather plain, at least when eaten as an accompaniment to other foods, and unless you're on a low-sodium diet it's a good source of complex carbohydrates.
Neither wheat nor rice can be treated as providing a full range of nutrients. this isn't the place to get into details but living on grains alone won't provide enough macro- or micro-nutrients.