[Verizon Galaxy S 5 General] robomouse:
Yeah, but don't sell yourself short by saying even you could do it despite being a blonde teenage girl. You've clearly got skills with this and they aren't despite anything.

Well, like I've said in my OP, I googled and googled and the problem isn't that I don't know how to google it's that every method I've come across has had some flaw that doesn't work with a locked stock Verizon S5 900V using 5.0 Lollipop. Or the dates on them are from years ago with no updates. The tutorial I came across right before I found this one said at the very end that it won't work with 5.0 Lollipop, but it will work with 5.1 and I was ready to smash my phone in frustration because Verizon isn't going to roll out a 5.1 update for the S5.

But I'm not doing that. A person asking a question for the first time isn't doing that. A person who is rooting their first phone and simply makes a mistake is not doing that. I've seen a good bit of people doing that, but there's no reason to treat those who are honestly trying and working to follow instructions as if they're wanting their hands held.

As for the complexity, it's just like with anything else. For some, it's going to be easier than pie, others will need to work at it, and some might never figure it out because they aren't wired for it. For example, I had to (due to admin screw up) go back to undergrad to take advanced stats and I am drowning in it. I'm math phobic and it's only by the grace of the technical writing portion that I'm going to get out of this with the required C. I've googled until my eyes bled, watched tutorial videos, even got a tutor and I still don't understand most of it. Meanwhile, my classmate Karla intuitively understands all the math, but keeps bombing the writing portion. I'm constantly editing her homework and correcting errors she could find by googling. Except I know that she's done that over and over and it just doesn't click in her head.

Missing the point that I'm not talking about the people I mentioned in my OP who keep refusing to follow instructions written in crayon over and over again. I'm talking about people who've worked their ass off to do it right, googled everything they could to figure out the parts they don't understand, only to find that any questions they might have will be responded to with snotty comments about reading or googling. It's really discouraging on top of root technique after root technique failing to work for whatever arbitrary reason.

But we're already driving the car and decided the standard features aren't doing it for us. We're trying to learn how to modify our car, but it's like being handed a stack of chapters from a dozen different Haynes manuals, to figure out which chapter is the one that pertains to our specific car's mod. Randomly placed in each chapter is a post-it saying "this won't work if you don't have X" or "99/100 people tried it and it melted their car." By the time we get to the bottom of the stack, we've learned a lot of methods that don't fix the car. So we get to the last chapter that pinky swears to be exactly the instructions we need, just like all the other methods that pinky swear they were the right solution. And we're reasonably skeptical at this point, but all the mechanics around who've done this for ages or who were lucky enough to have a car with an easy-to-access parts complain when we ask a question. Maybe the instructions covers this and we're just too brain fried from all the other piles of chapters and overlooked it. Maybe that part of the instructions was written in a way that wasn't intuitive to first-time car repairs. Maybe it turns out what we thought was a car with a stock starter was really an aftermarket and now we have to dismantle the exhaust assembly to get to it. Or maybe because the last time we got an oil change, the mechanic helpfully tinkered with the electrical and the instructions that were supposed to work have to be scrapped for

Like I said in my OP and here, not everyone has the same skills or abilities. You and the non-English speaker you helped clearly have a knack for this. A lot of us don't. It sucks, but that's the way it is. If we're lucky, we have a knack for something other people find confusing.

This is where I spend some time googling because what you said seems (to my newbie experience) to be something new and after reading a bunch in other places, I now know the difference between NI2 and NK2, which are terms I hadn't encountered before (or didn't get that far in other tutorials because I found out they weren't for my phone). Except I have more questions than when I started and forum searches haven't answered them. But I don't feel like I can ask them here, much less the bootloader question that's preventing me from even trying this tutorial in the first place.