Having same MAC on different bridges is awkward but doesn’t necessarily break anything … as long as they don’t become part of same L2 network.
Bridge has different personalities (read more in this article). MAC address is only used by “the switch-facing interface of the router”, “bridge activity” is also about same entity.
Torch will only see trafic between two switched ports if it’s not HW offloaded. Your switch is a very good one and can offload (almost) everything to switch chip (it’s the only way to consistently reach wire-speed transfers), so it’s normal you don’t see traffic. If you have to sniff traffic, first disable HW offload on port you want to check.