yea those holes won't hurt a thing. They should help. I drill I think like 1 or 1.25 inch holes in mine, but thats preplanting. I go bottom and sides right up to top, and I mean lots of em!!! Like anymore would weeken the pot too much. Thats why I use the weed block fabric to keep the soil in, you know the stuff you put under mulch to keep weeds from popping through. For a smililar size container to a 5 gallon bucket is a milk crate, super sturdy, and line that baby with fabric and that pot is super breathable. Far cheaper than the rigid commercially available containers and unlike a fabric pot its rigid. Also make sure you are sitting it up on something, even just a couple spare bamboo sticks or something so the bottom can vent and drain well...
Pretty sure those are fungus gnats. Definetly indication of too wet of soil. Now I fight em a bit, but in coco I keep it moist all the time, coco doens't require the dry cycle that other mediums do, so it does temp them in. But go get some mosquito dunks from a big box store, they are to put in yard ponds and such. You only need a chunk of one, as they are designed for big areas of water, put it in your watering container, then fill with water and let it sit with that dunk in it till you water, days if possible. keep the chunk and repeat, fill em up with water as soon as you use the water so that dunk can soak in that water till next feeding. Its a bacteria of sorts in the dunk, so it won't harm your plant but will eat those things in larvae form. Yellow sticky traps will whack the most of the adults, but you gotta do something about those larvae or you'll have a never ending supply of adults unless you dry that soil out so bad you endanger the plant...
I've also been told you can scoop out top inch of soil or so to get many of the larvae, then cover the top layer with sand, dicotomous earth, rice hulls, etc. But I'm happy with the dunks... may try sand on top from the get go next round tho...
