I found SQL Antipatterns by Bill Karwin to be a great book on the topic of patterns and best practices with SQL. As a bonus, it's relatively platform agnostic if I recall correctly.
Regarding your first question - In English, most people would agree that "grab the beer from the fridge" is more natural than "from the fridge grab the beer". For what it's worth I've always considered this aspect of SQL maddening and I always start with SELECT * and work my way back later.
Regarding your second, this is probably because FROM means something different from JOIN. FROM indicates you are starting a block of JOINED tables. Technically if the syntax wasn't natural it might look like:
SELECT *
FROM
JOIN FOO ON NOTHING
JOIN BAR ON FOO.ID = BAR.FooID
Given how annoyingly verbose the syntax is already I'm happy to go with what we were given.
You basically described Lean Manufacturing, one of the direct inspirations for Agile software development practices... so I guess we're going full circle now.
I mostly agree with you, but I need to be a bit pedantic and point out that a boycott is voting with your wallet. It's better, actually, because you vote with your wallet and tell the publisher that you did and you encourage others to follow suit. This way publishers can't just blame something else for the lack of sales for Generic 3d Shooter: Curbstomp Edition.
Actually I believe you aren't even legally obligated to return them, whether they pay for shipping or not. This is to prevent mail fraud (someone sending something and then invoicing for it).