1) I disagree with your first statement, just because some work that really "wows" me is so beyond my comprehension that it's difficult to learn from it; sometimes, that's a core element of being "wowed": the astonished person doesn't quite know why he's astonished. How can he learn from example?
As far as my photos being boring, not going to contest that. You just have to remember that, at this point, expediency is the main factor. I rigged up a system to pull selected files from my public Flickr account, which consist almost entirely of photos I do in my own time...which means there's a high proportion of wide lenses, as opposed to shots at 200mm...because I don't casually carry around the 200mm.
2) Also no contest...the technical details are trivial to include or exclude (once you've written a script that gathers photos from Flickr and reads the metadata). For now, I find them more useful than writing out as narrative, "For this photo, I used my f2.8 lens wide open"...More can be done with the data design but I want readers to know at a glance what's going on before they read the caption of the photo. I'm hoping this leads to more active reading, because the reader has to ask himself "This photo is shot at f8.0 and yet the background is so blurred, how is that?"
> I was looking at all the cool photos and I really wanted to know the f-stop, the exposure, the ISO that the author used. It took me about a year to figure out it didn't matter. Main reason being - you will never encounter that exact scene with that exact lighting.
I say that exact sentiment: don't worry about the numbers or the math. Maybe I didn't say it strong enough but I'm happy that someone on HN agrees and I'm not just dumbing down the math. I think memorization of numbers is silly.
What I want readers to be able to do is approach each photographic situation with a problem-solving mindset:
"This scene is dark. I want the photo to show my friend's face clearly, how do I balance the three settings and which flaw am I most willing to introduce into my photo to prevent other more critical flaws?"
3 and 4) Yep, no argument. And nowhere do I say, "copy these numbers down"
5) Now the most important point of learning how to photograph well: STOP READING TECHNICAL GARBAGE.
I agree, that's why I wrote this book in the first place. Obviously I haven't done it in the same way that you would but I don't think we disagree at all.