That's exactly what I did. Fresh out of the Institute, got my dream assignment on my very first tour (DDG out of Yoko) , now 10 years in about to report to my 4th ship and it's still the worst tour I've had. Not because of any inherent failings in Yokosuka-based DDGs, mind you, (well, actually, 7th Fleet liberty restrictions were part of it) but because the command climate on that particular ship at that particular time just sucked, the Surface Navy was going through one of its "training? we don't need no stinking training!" stints, and I was hoping to do a middle east deployment, but it turned out by the time I got there they weren't sending any FDNF Japan ships to 5th fleet: they just stayed Westpac my entire tour. I don't know if that's still true.
I don't say all this to dissuade anyone from going to Japan, but only to highlight that there are no golden ticket guaranteed rockets to superSWOdom. Whether you get a DDG out of Rota or an LSD out of Little Creek, it comes down to you and how you handle the challenges you're presented with in the end.
1) You can expect to stand watch every day underway, sometimes twice a day. In port, it will be once every few days. All depending on how many people your ship has to man the watches it's required to man.
2) It's the same pin with the same quals required. Basic Damage Control, 3M Divo, Division Officer Afloat, OOD Inport, Small Boat Officer, SWO Engineering, CIC Watch Officer, ATTWO, and OOD Underway. That's straight from the instruction. What will be different is the emphasis placed in certain areas of those quals. Qualifying CIC Watch Officer on an MCM, for instance, we obviously placed a lot of emphasis on how to conduct mine countermeasures operations. When I qual'd on the DDG, there was a lot of emphasis on AEGIS and surface/air/anti-submarine warfare. I'd say we covered more on the DDG. Conversely, since my particular DDG almost always had a TAO and almost never a CICWO, I saw the division officers on the MCM stand a lot more CIC watch on the MCM than I did on my DDG. I'd say they walked away with a lot more experience on how to run the watch in CIC than I did coming off my DDG. Similarly, you're more likely to focus on landing/launching helos to qualify as OOD on a DDG whereas an amphib will have that and also well deck operations. And of course on an MCM we've never heard of either of those things, but you can expect a lot of attention will be paid to how to handle the ship when deploying/recovering sweep gear.
That said, I don't want to dissuade you from DDG or AMPHIB: those will offer you the most flexibility later on and are platforms that will be around for decades (you could very well spend your entire sea-going career all the way through to command at sea just doing tours on DDG-51 or LPD-17 class vessels if you were so inclined, LCS too). I would just caution you on letting people who have never served on a particular platform convince you that said platform is a bad way to go. There are no bad ways to go as a division officer, so long as you know what you're getting yourself into, it's what you want, and you do well. I'd also suggest that, if a few years from now you should find yourself working with someone who has served on a different platform, you not judge them based on stereotypes.
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