1) were there purposely not enough to give the promanade a nicer view?

The accusation has been made, to my knowledge it was never proven. It was known that the ship's designer Mr. Andrews was greatly concern about the issue of the number of boats and had gone back to the drawing board to redesign the boat davits to allow them to launch multiple boats. It was unclear if the redesigned davits were installed by the time she sailed but it was clear that it was intended to have enough boats installed eventually.

2) did they know they weren't equipped with enough boats to save the passengers and crew?

Yes but they had more than the number of boats required by the current regulations at the time. The emergency scenarios considered by the designers all led to an assumption that the ship would stay afloat for many hours, enough time for assistance to reach the ship. It was therefore considered that there only needed to be enough boats for an orderly transfer to another ship with the assistance of that ship's boats.

3) were they "faulty"?
No, there was no report of any boat failing during the incident, the boats were tested fully loaded at the shipyard and passed with no problems. The Titanic's crew however were not adequately trained or practiced at launching boats at sea. It was the maiden voyage and there had been no lifeboat drill. This lead to many boats being launched without being fully loaded by crew unsure of how to load the boats and inadequate management of the passengers to direct them to available boats.