There are a whole lot of questions in there, and since I've never thought of Clouser's as jig flies and am not a conventional tackle fisherman anyway, I'm probably not the one to answer, but here's a start.
We all agree that a jig is heavy at the head/nose, so that it dives head first. And true jig fisherman fish vertically for the most part, right? A Clouser or jiggy, on the other hand, is usually not fished vertically, but either retrieved like other flies or drifted. On most retrieves, the head weighting gets you a wobble and a partial dive, but not a true bottom hop. One exception is on the flats, where people fish Clousers to bounce along the bottom like a bonefish fly (Crazy Charlie). That's usually in shallow water, where you want a bottom hugging fly, so you don't need very heavy eyes. I don't personally fish that way much, but I know lots of guys who do so (the Monomoy crowd, for one). Again, you're not jigging up and down, but you are hopping along the bottom, which may be close to true jigging. Still, most of the times I've fished a Clouser, I've fished it more like other flies, and used the eyes just to get the flies down some and maybe enhance the action.
Also, when the eyes/weight get past a certain point, the flies really can be "jigged," but then I stop using them, because they feel awful to cast and start to veer away from what I like to call fly fishing. One time I fished the Northshore of Boston with a guy who used dumbell eyed squid flies. The eyes were probably big enough to weigh 1/4 or more of an ounce, and I hated, hated fishing them. It just didn't feel like I was fly fishing. If you really need to get deep, a sinking line (leadcore, sinktip, whatever) is a much better way to do it. At the smaller weights, however, Clouser's aren't really all that heavy and just have a nice swimming action.
Trout fisherman have weighted their nymphs and streamers forever, but in more recent years, coneheads and beadheads have become popular. Are they "jig" flies? In relative terms, those tungston beads are way heavier, but again, the flies don't nosedive, they just drift closer to the bottom. Same with those coneheaded streamers, which aren't "jigged."
So, I don't know what the definition of a jig fly is, but I know that I do adjust weights according to how deep I want to fish, how much wobble I want, etc. I think calling them weighted or front-weighted flies is maybe more accurate. Truth be told, I've kind of stopped fishing with them in recent years in the NE, but they sure have worked on lots of different fish for me in the past. For instance, the Clouser is in some ways the ideal bonefish fly, because it's great for being hopped along the bottom on a shallow flat. In that environment, with those bottom oriented fish, its design is perfect. I also love swinging them in fast current so smallies (for whom the clouser was invented). Sometimes, on the lower Delaware, smallies don't want a surface or near surface fly, and swinging a streamer a little deeper (1-2 feet) is a great technique. It may be that the Clouser comes into its own not in striper fishing, but in other contexts.
Anyway -- that answers none of your questions, but just recounts some ways that they're effective flies.
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