In regard to the confusion about the exciting the Higgs,
By definition, a particle is a quantum flluctuation about a vacuum, i.e pick a classical field configuration of minimal energy, that is the vev of your field, consider small fluctuations about it and quantize them (have them obey Bose or fermi-Dirac statistics). This is precisely what is meant by exciting the vacuum with a single creation operator. Note, in QFT the fields appearing in the lagrangian should always be understood as a two-term structure: the vev plus the fluctuation.
Since the vacuum must be Lorentz invariant, the only field which can have a non-zero vev is the (scalar) Higgs field. (Of course we can have non-zero vevs for non-abelian gauge fields, e.g. Instanton backgrounds and etc, but for our discussion we can ignore these). So, for most fields the vev piece is set to zero and what really appears in the lagrangian is just the fluctuation which you would like to quantize.
Now, the essential point is that the background is fixed at the vevs of your fields and it never changes. Thus, we have zero vevs for all the fields but the Higgs. Particles should be thought as small (quantum) fluctuations propagating in this background with their mass parameters depending on the vev of the Higgs field. For all these to work out nicely though, we must couple the "massive" fields to the Higgs field, which appears in L with a zero vev at the moment, then add a spontaneously-symmetry-breaking potential term in the Lagrangian which picks up the vev of the Higgs and thereafter we need to consider a shift of the Higgs in order to make sure that the theory will be quantized on a true (stable) vacuum. Note that initially there are no mass terms for these fields. After the shift, the massive fields acquire a mass term from the vev piece as well as some other coupling terms with the Higgs. So, the mass terms do not involve any interactions with the "quanta" of the Higgs field but rather they contain an explicit factor of its vev. In other words, all the particles feel heavy when they propagate in the presence of this non-zero vev.
Higgs excitations do not alter the vev and hence, neither the mass parameters. They only turn on interactions among the massive fields and the Higgs bosons with a yukawa coupling parameter. You can probe these interactions at different energy scales and determine the value of the yukawa coupling at these energies. You can also determine the mass parameters and then given e.g. Mass of W = g.v/2 you can determine v=vev, and confirm that it's independent of the probe scale.
