re: No matter what direction we point a telescope, we always look toward the Big Bang - why?

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But don’t you mean the point of origin?

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That's the most difficult thing about inflation to wrap your head around.

The whole universe IS the point of origin. It is not an explosion from a point out, it is that point getting bigger.

You are an ant on top of a silver dollar. It inflates like the big bang... 100k years later you are a dog on a football field. 2 million years later you are an obese man in Catahoula Parish.

From our point of view we are INSIDE the point of origin.

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If the outer skin is expanding, how do we see it?

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We don't because, the best we know, it is expanding at the speed of light. And light is the only tool we have to "see". IF we could say, possibly, dark energy then we might be looking at any possible number such as 50 billion years. But because light is our only tool, we are limited to "seeing" it only and it takes time to reach us.

It is possible inflation exceeded the speed of light because light has a fixed/constant speed IN space. But space itself, inflation-big bang, isn't necessarily beholden to that speed limit. So space-time may be much further than light because it is 'expanding' faster than light can travel. Which is just another reason we will never know where the edge is as long as we are limited to using light (as the fastest and constant metric) as our only tool to define that space.

It is possible that is what 'dark energy' is. It is the energy created when space itself left a gap between itself and and all other forms of energy (which according to special relativity is related to matter). It's possible that space 'pulled a vacuum' on light and dark energy popped into existence to fill that gap. And once in existence it stayed forever.