Trip is one VERY useful maneuver to specialize in, IF (and I repeat IF) you know you are going to be fighting a lot of humanoid creatures. Like grapple, the CMB you target gets increasingly higher as your character levels and can easily outpace your ability to hit that target roll.
Trip doesn't normally work on enemies more than 1 size larger than you. The main ways to get around that are to wear heavy armour and get some specific feats, or to cast a spell and actually become larger. A staff magus fails at the first but works OK with the second. Make sure you learn some polymorphs which keep their hands.
Another problem is that flying enemies (not just able to fly, actually flying) and legless enemies (snake-monsters and oozes mostly) can't be tripped. There's no answer to the legless enemies and the answers to flying enemies aren't good. Just accept you can't trip everything and don't overspecialise.
As a magus don't worry too much about the rate at which CMD scales. Worst case you use true strike with spell combat and virtually ensure success.
Feats - dirty fighting or combat expertise, improved trip, greater trip. Like I said, don't overspecialise in something you can't use all the time and spend some feats on a different trick.
Practically any race could be a magical forest hermit. *thinks* No, any race at all.
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I mean tripping twirl seems cool but is it to situational?
Too situational, and it has a number of poor feats as prerequisite, and it doesn't work with spell combat.
Magus guide, it has a lengthy feat section.