[General Questions and Answers] yannick.12:
Thanks both of you for the comments and responses. Below is some background which doesn't have any more questions, but is an attempt to explain why I was asking (i.e. moaning!) in the first place.

Rooting -- what I've realised is that I feel really uneasy about the whole process. It seems to rely heavily on trust, for example. Let me explain what I'm comparing it with. 15 years ago (before I had kids) I was a unix hacker and I would download linux source code from a reputable place and compile it myself on various PCs. These sites (containing the linux source code) would be reasonable professional sites with no ads and probably things like md5sums to check your download and so on, the source code would be plainly visible so you could look through it yourself, and the forums associated with them would be professionally run and contributors would clearly be educated people. I've only recently moved into the rooting roms business, basically spurred on by my kids (aged 14 and 12) who are becoming interested in how much they can get out of their android devices, and basically I'm quite surprised about how in comparison it seems like much more of an "amateur set-up". A lot of it is based on "here is a file, download it, trust me, it's fine, but you can't check this". This is fine for my kids, who just use their phones as game tools, but far less fine for me, because I use my phone to manage my finances, my work emails, my childcare, and a lot of other stuff where it's really important that nothing goes wrong [and this is why my main phone is not rooted.] There seems to be far less documentation, and what there is is spread around widely, there are plenty of threads which are dead/out of date and contains links to wildly out-of-date versions of things and so on. xda is absolutely great, once you find the great bits, but it also contains a huge sprawling mess of noise. TechMinerUK suggests (and I'm sure they are right) that one can find all the answers to the questions I'm asking on the forums and on the web. But in a well-organized scenario there would be some clean "front page" which contains a well-signposted FAQ about rooting, a FAQ about roms etc etc, rather than having to google around for everything. Of course I did google for information before I posted the questions above -- I had several more questions in fact, and google answered some of them and I posted the rest. Perhaps the key difference is the following -- 15 years ago a generic college student was only just beginning to hear about the internet and probably had no access to it in their own home, and the people setting up websites were professionals, who probably worked in computer science departments at universities. Nowadays the people rooting their phones might well be college kids with no salaries (yet), or maybe even schoolkids, so everything is perhaps being run on a more "hobby" basis. bweN diorD suggests that people aren't going to pay a little for convenient access to stuff like roms and perhaps this hits the nail on the head -- my demographic (middle-aged waged people) wouldn't think twice about donating a little to support a cause they want to see succeed -- but on the other hand I couldn't see my kids donating to support anything, because they have no income themselves. Perhaps basically the reason all these files end up on these dubious file-sharing websites is that the average wage of the contributor to this game is far less than the average wage of the people writing the linux source code 15 years ago.

That's just some background as to where the questions came from. Thanks again for the answers, and I will keep googling, if that's the way that it's supposed to work now,

Y