>From the animation on FairPhone site, I counted 17 screws and 6 standoff. How many people, who would not even try to repair their phone will find this easy enough to start repairing their phone?

So we developed into society where 17 screws is such a major problem to deal with it... Also people who wouldn't not even try to repair their phone will not try even if there is no screw.

In my opinion such phone should appeal to what you call geeky crowd and from there it should initiate some social change (probably via media such as Internet) where changing 17 screws will not be difficult task but highly rewarding in terms of being human and hardware/cost wise. After that it should spread to people and with it the hardware becomes industrial standard (parts at least) so the price of changing goes down both in cost and finding them.