This reads like a long rant about having a case of buyer's remorse. That said, I can understand his frustrations with a device like the Freewrite.
A few comments as someone who has done a lot of writing both pre- and post-computers.
- I am most certainly not Hemingway but you could write on a typewriter--especially inverted pyramid, newspaper style. Yes, you did compose a sentence or a paragraph mentally. And, then, between you and/or an editor there was various (literal) cutting and pasting/scratching out/etc.
- However, you get used to certain styles of doing things. These days, I mostly don't even like writing someplace I don't have Internet access because I'm accustomed to being able to check facts, look something up, etc. on the fly. Hard copies of research materials are just a partial solution.
- Yes, focus is a thing but there are probably better ways to achieve it than using something that is so suboptimal in other ways.
If you have something printed out, you can cut up the paragraphs or sentences and physically rearrange them until you figure out an order that makes sense. It's much faster than doing the same thing with ctrl-X ctrl-V, and when you ctrl-X, the material you've cut vanishes from sight.
Unless you've had experience with physical paste-ups, it's hard to appreciate.
In vi/vim, the concept of seting marks then moving copy (especially with a split in the buffer so that the original / destination locations are both visible) comes reasonably close. It at least avoids that intermittent disappearance onto the clipboard / paste buffer.
That said. I have a lot of writing experience and I'm mostly not going to sweat the average 1,000 word piece I write. I do like starting off in Scrivener for the odd longer piece I write on a Mac.
For longer works --- fiction or otherwise --- structure matters far more, and works written without consideration to this tend to show this as much lower in quality.
That said, many writers (both before and after invention of typewriters) would dictate their works to an assistant who would either write longhand or type the text. If you read a lot of 19th and early 20th century material, this is sometimes evident in the style, which tends toward conversational. I'm presuming these would typically at least begin with notes.
John McPhee is an example of a writer whose works are heavily structured, and who relies on index cards for drafting his stories, as well as extensive editing and rewriting. (See also Niklaus Luhmann and Nabokov.)
I have a script[1] I use to generate a zoomed out PNG version (barely readable) of any PDF document I'm working on. Recently I started printing out the resulting PNG on paper and "editing" and re-ordering chunks using scissors.
It was tremendously useful on a current chapter I was working on: I knew it was too long (60 pages) when I printed it out and the pages (even zoomed out at 20%) took up the whole room! After restructuring, I managed to cut it into sections that all fit on the table (20 pages max).
[1] https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/536939e36a9dc0f9bb80969...
Use `--maxpages 5` command option for 20% zoom (five PDF pages per sheet). That's barely readable, but good for overview.