[myTouch 4G General] zygh0st:
Disclaimer: Some of this may come off harsh, it's unintentional I assure you; I've been told by many people I sound like I'm being a jerk when I simply know no other way to present the information than in as simple a form as possible, so reader be warned and do try not to take offense!

Actually, all of the directories you see under / (the root of the filesystem or root for short) DO exist on every Android installation regardless of the version or ROM for the most part. There are a few alterations between major Android versions (think Gingerbread to ICS or ICS to JB) but those are mostly related to the SDCard or external filesystems in general. There are also differences related to specific devices, for example; you won't find /data/media on devices that don't have an internal storage designed to mimic an SDCard (such as the Samsung Galaxy series.)

That being said, the kernel does not reside in a directory at all, it resides on a partition that is mounted as /. The kernel's ramdisk is actually where /init and /init.rc and such actually are and that is why you can't change them and have the changes persist across reboots even if the root partition is remounted as read/write. In addition to this information, one does not simply "move things around" within a deeply rooted filesystem structure like you were rearranging furniture.

And to get to the real information you're after, the reason your device fails to boot when you flash an incompatible kernel is because the kernel and the ROM, for lack of a better example, don't know how to speak to one another and one get's pissed off and they stop talking; or in other cases one gets severe dementia and repeats itself indefinitely (bootloops anyone?). Oh, and the bootanimation.zip is in the same place on every Android device. You don't need to flash it at all, it goes in /system/media/ but you'll have to remount /system as read/write first (which is why flashable zips are convenient, you don't have to mess with it and you're going to have to reboot anyway to see your new animation, right?)

And in closing, the directory structure of Team Venom's ROM and every other ROM that exists is about 99% the same. You may not have seen it before, but there's no need to drag out Shrodinger's poor cat is there? I assure you it's been there lurking in the shadows ;) What I need is the source code to a kernel that is known to work with ICS/Sense ROMs, and as I previously stated in another post I simply haven't looked that hard yet. I have an errand or two to run this early afternoon, but you have my word I'll do my best to try and get a working kernel to you by 0500 GMT, which is midnight for me. That gives me 12 hours from now, too easy :p And it'll be flashable, I'm a lazy person to be honest so I have a script that compiles the kernel, builds the ramdisk, makes the boot image from the two, creates a flashable zip, uploads said zip to the device, creates a script for recovery (I use TWRP 2.5.0.0 FYI) to flash the zip and reboot, and then reboots the device into recovery. That way I only have to press return once :cool:

I hope you found some of that useful and if you'd like any more information I'd be happy to give you all that I have, it's kind of an uncontrollable thing with me so be mindful of what you ask because you will get a wash of info in return and my stop button seems to work sparingly, haha. Have a good day!