"Most scale armor types don't change much from Roman times through to the Middle Ages. After all, how many different ways are there to affix small over lapping coins of metal to a jacket?"
There are more ways than most people would care to imagine. Suffice to say, the type of armor the Saxons use in the program is not accurate for the period. There would possibly be a handful of very wealthy nobles who had acquired some similar armor through trade from afar, but to say it would be not be common is the understatement of the century. Chainmail was the ubiquitious, domestically made armor of choice for those who could afford it -- and most could not.
"LOL... Which runs counter to pretty much everything ever written about them. From every account I've read, they were not only physically impressive specimens, but their martial arts and tactics were extremely effective."
A great deal of their reputation stems from them having been pagans slaughtering defenseless Christians in abbies and outlying villages -- they were thought to be some form of chastisement from God. Objectively speaking, the political situation in Northumbria was tenuous, with multiple men vying for the throne of the kingdom and weakening considerably. Once the Vikings gained a foothold by scooping up Northumbria, they were provided a base camp, horses, and supplies in East-Anglia, the people there preferring that to the fate of Northumbria. Mercia was weak and divided. In France, they faced stiff resistence, but the French kings preferred to pay the invaders off rather than fight them. In the 880's for example, after the residents of Paris heroically fended off a Viking attack, the French king granted the Vikings a large payment of silver and safe passage to the coast, rather than annihilating them. They garnered a lot of success simply because good men refused to stand up to them. Once the Christian kingdoms truly stood against them, the Vikings didn't hold out particularly long. The Vikings were exception travellers and fierce warriors, but the near-supernatural reputation they've acquired is based as much in legend as reality.
On the next topic -- Macleod's study has been extrapolated far beyond it's findings. The Vikings intended to settle Britain, so of course many of them brought their wives and children with them. It doesn't mean anything, except that. The study is unavailable to the public for general viewing, but I do know that the only female grave that supposedly contained a sword, in reality contained fragments of metal that some archeologists have conjectured were part of a sword -- hardly compelling.