Honestly it is probably because there is some annoyance or another which comes down to the philosophy of whichever distro you are using.
Here are my slight annoyances:
ArchLinux: got more opinionated see /usr/bin and python3 in recent history, breaks a lot for a distro
Linux Mint: Broke firefox forced google custom search then DDG
Ubuntu: Unity Mir
Debian: Slow moving, long freezes in packages
Fedora: I don't need SELinux on my desktop box, font rendering (don't like infinality)
Opensuse: Need to use OBS to get packages that probably should be in a main repo
That being said I've never been that annoyed with any of the Distributions to actually go and build one.
I used arch linux for many years but after python3 broke everything I left for ubuntu 10.04 then after that went up I tried unity but didn't really like that, but I stuck with it until ubuntugnome was an official thing.
Right now Debian Wheezy on desktop, Ubuntu Gnome laptop, and both seem to work well enough. I've lost my want to customize my OS so much anymore since I'm not on arch linux and it becomes a little harder when you don't have something as easy to use as the arch build system.
I'm a bit older than you (6 years) and had a cell phone since I was in (I think) middle school. My phone was primarily for staying in contact with my mother because I was out of the house a large amount of the time, you don't need a smartphone for this.
At this time I think it probably would suck to be older than 13 and not have a phone, everyone you know is going to have one and that is going to be how they communicate with their friends if you don't have one you will get left out of the loop.
It is a parents choice but it might hurt children socially, on the other hand there were a few outliers in my high school who spent every minute of class on their phone (before smartphones were big) but this could be solved with prepaid phones.
I had a differing high school experience where I had more male teachers than female and all of those male teachers were over 40 save 1 new teacher. It was a public school but perhaps some other bias caused this at the school.
Surprisingly I had 2 science teachers and 1 math teacher that were Engineers in previous careers but decided to move into teaching (far before retirement age).
Maybe with programs like http://www.teachforamerica.org/ we'll start seeing more professionals change careers into teaching.
Anecdote: I had a family friend move into teaching from engineering but he found it hard to find a job not teaching in the ghetto or for schools catering to troubled teens and after a few years moved back into engineering.
I think it might be a pretty small group of people that know about bootstrap but don't/can't figure out how to use it, and will pay $59-79 dollars for an ebook.
$25 is a reasonable price for ebooks with a large amount of useful content but won't get impulse buys.
$5-10 will get impulse buys but you might not get as much money in aggregate.
$59-70 is ridiculous for any book, to me that is like textbook pricing.
I personally probably would've bought it in the $5-10 dollar range even though I know bootstrap and find the documentation easy to understand.
Best of luck.
Edit: I never made it to your $29-39 ebook pricing which might grab more people, might want to show that there are 2 options better (2 columns maybe).
How long ago did you switch back, because recently this seems to happen less and less. If you're smart and pick a laptop which has proven linux compatibility it really doesn't happen anymore.
I remember 5 years ago getting speakers to mute on my laptop when I plugged headphones in was impossible but I haven't seen a similar problem in my last few laptops.
Any modern website should hopefully look decent/good at that resolution considering the ipad is 1024 width in wide mode (or the ones that show up in my GA are).
Media Queries are king, and so are responsive websites, so hopefully websites start using them.
I still make sure internet explorer < 9 is set to a ~960px width because of the prevalence of 1024 width (It is my highest ranking screen resolution on non-technical sites.
That was kind of my point about the rough start, you won't get emacs to do the real work without putting time into figuring out how to get it to go.
The tutorial is more of a get you started and make sure you can actually edit text in emacs.
The most important parts of the tutorial are the how to save (which most people get to) and getting more help which is probably what people don't get to or understand. It isn't the best thing but it is okay if people make it through the end.
But you're right if you don't want to mess with your editor and `learn` emacs go for a starter kit or go for another editor with bells and whistles included.
The starter packages like prelude and emacs-starter-kit are more like a learning to walk with a crutch when you have perfectly working legs. They offer an easy way to start but once you start using them you'll find it hard to do it the normal way (like when you need to modify your emacs config or add some new elisp that isn't included).
It is better just to start emacs do C-h t and start learning, then add and configure when needed. You'll need to start out rough but after a while you'll learn how emacs works and be a better emacs user because of it.
Though if you don't invest in emacs and just need it to finish your thesis or because a professor won't let you use anything else then the starter kits could be fine as they are pre-configured.
Remember that OSX makes fonts a lot thicker so this font looks insanely thin on other OSs. I'm on linux with ubuntu font rendering which is somewhat thicker than windows and it looks to thin to me.
Usually this means that it will look impossibly thin on Windows.
There are modern calculators: Mathematica, Matlab, and the most used: Excel
For tasks that need to be done away from a computer sure a calculator is handy but that has rather dwindled down to basic calculations. Schoolwork sure calculators are great but I never needed more than my HP-48 and when I did it was usually an assignment meant more for MATLAB/Mathematica.
Now for your point of building it on top of android, what I want is not another device but I want a new calculator built for android. Everyone has a smartphone these days why should I have to buy a calculator when I have a strong computer in my pocket. We just need an interface for smartphones and the appropriately strong (Programmable) back end.