I believe I answered a similar question to this earlier in the course. Nonetheless @astute covered basically everything and then some. I don’t remember exactly why I chose to use COLOR over SV_Target but SV_Target would indeed cover just about everything we’d need. I believe I was just used to using COLOR for a lot of these shaders so I stuck with it.
As far as the vert_img, this is a built in function like already mentioned above so I used that. Since we weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary in terms of those functions I just utilized all the premade shader code Unity provides.
Also thanks @astute for providing a detailed reply. Sometimes it’s easy to forget all the shader syntax and logic involved.