[Nexus 4 General] efrant:
Not directed specifically at you hgmichna. Directed at everyone who uses toolkits, and doesn't understand why I am against them.

Ok, let's just be clear here: whether you are using a toolkit or doing things yourself, the "level of risk" (as you put it), is the same. It is very difficult to brick a Nexus 4, so I wouldn't worry at all about "damaging" your device with a toolkit.

What a toolkit does damage, however, is the user -- it keeps the user ignorant, and unable to troubleshoot many issues. I've used this example in other threads before, but I'll use it again: Why do elementary schools not allow students to use a calculator before learning how to do arithmetic on their own? Because the would never learn how to do it if they were allowed calculators. If they never learned and, by some chance, they press the wrong numbers on the calculator, they would believe the answer that appears is the correct one, when in fact it is not. Same principles apply with toolkits/scripts.

"But efrant, it takes so much more time to do things manually." Well, actually, not really. For example, typing in 5-6 short lines in a command prompt to re-flash your device to stock takes no more than 15-30 seconds more than launching a toolkit and clicking the buttons. If you think 15 seconds more is "so much more time", well then I can't help you.

"But efrant, I don't have time to learn all this complicated stuff." It's not like you are writing code or anything here. It's just flashing images and/or updates to your device. It is extremely simple stuff and doesn't take very much time to learn at all. And besides, this site is about learning -- as per the link in my signature, if you don't care about the journey (i.e., learning), you probably shouldn't be here in the first place.

"But efrant, you're a developer and have been doing this for years, so of course it's easy for you." I'm not a developer and I have no background whatsoever in Linux/Android or even I.T. I work in a completely unrelated field (finance). I just picked this stuff up from reading the wealth of information on these forums, and playing around with my device, nothing more than that.

Without reading, and being curious, and investigating (for example, pulling apart scripts that others make), we will never learn anything. The key is to start off small. Grab a recovery-flashable zip that, say, flashes a kernel. Open it up. Look at all the files in it. Try to think of what they would do. Open up the updater-script file in the zip. Try and understand the three or four lines that are in there and what they do. Go on to the next zip. Then the next one. Then eventually look at the updater-script in an OTA update and see if you can make sense of what is there. Eventually, you will be able to make your own recover-flashable scripts that can, for example, flash kernels, install apps, replace files, etc. It is all very easy, but people here seem to think that it's so difficult, and they make those that create these zip sound like "Android gods", when in actually fact, it is all quite simple.

Now, once you can do manually all of the things that a script or toolkit can do, then by all means use a toolkit. But at that point, I would bet that you would find the toolkit cumbersome compared to doing it manually. And I would bet that, if you were using a script, you would rather write your own little script rather than use someone else's. :)