[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] ashclepdia:
That temperament is something that is gained. MOST of us have been in that "oh holy crap what do I do now?!?! Im not prepared for this!!" Moments (my first one was on my birthday back when I had DroidX2, and didn't have my own computer to restore it using RSDlite sbf flash.. I accidentally flashed something that didn't work, and was left with no OS stuck in bootloop with no way to get into the bootstrap recovery we had...was without device for 3 days until I could get to a coworkers laptop!! Lol!!!) But the stress goes WAY down after you've restored device once or twice and have the tools at the ready with basic understanding of the steps at least :)

And as for drivers, I apologize for not warning/informing about that. I forgot that you mentioned you had multiple driver packages downloaded and i was going to clarify which to use(on a Linux setup you don't need drivers and it been a while since I used windows for my device so drivers aren't usually on my mind lol) I think a lot of people use the PDAnet drivers. But if you are connected to internet and just put device in fastboot mode and connect to computer, I think it will automatically find and install the correct drivers needed for fastboot/adb access.(the toolkit can also be used to install correct drivers I believe)

And don't worry, I wouldn't call using toolkit the "cowardly way". SOME people detest/despise use of toolkit since they think it takes away from learning and understanding how to do it without a toolkit. But when you use a toolkit you usually see command prompt correct? (Or at least a setting so you can SEE what it is running as far as commands) so you get to see what its doing, which helps beginners start to grasp the concepts of what it is doing.

Trust me, if you can use the toolkit correctly, you can easily transfer that knowledge to just using fastboot or adb commands.

by the way, fastboot is what's used for factory image restore. ADB is for pushing/pulling files, taking logs, sideloading a ROM/gapps zip that isn't on device, taking/restoring adb backups of system and or data, things like that. Think of adb as the "taker and giver". And fastboot as the "img installer/booter"...imgs being anything from system img files, to data partition img files, boot.img(aka kernel), recovery.img, bootloader update img, radio imgs. Things like that :)

The reason the knowledge from using toolkit easily transfers over to using just straight up fastboot for example is because of how they word the choices and menus. You will see it says something like "use fastboot to flash new recovery img", which the fastboot command for that in command line equates to "fastboot flash recovery "NameOfRecoveryImage.img" "

(With no quotes of course, and replace "NameOf...." With the actual file name of the recovery.img you have downloaded, and you can rename the downloaded recovery img file to something easier to type out if you want to also)

Basic structure of using fastboot command would be as follows:

fastboot[space]command[space]partitioname[space]filetobeused

Which after used once or twice is very easy to grasp basic usage :)

So are you able to at least boot into OS now? Also, make sure if you are trying to flash a KitKat ROM, that you install the 2.7TWRP recovery, anything earlier won't work correctly for 4.4based ROMs.

Again, any trouble feel free to ask.

(And apologies for the long rambling posts lol)