Not picking sides in the main fight here, just wanted to say though: real plumbing is hard work both physically and mentally, we should not be ashamed to compare it to programming.

This study seems to make no mention of debt -- worry about debt is a significant factor in happiness. I realize it doesn't mention a bunch of other important things also, but debt is so directly related with income that I am surprised it wasn't called out...

Completely agree with your closing statement. Mobile-first web dev/design practices are becoming more popular, well explored and well documented/explained these days. Lets hope this can deal with your "Apps are better" list items #2 and #3. #4 is being dealt with (somewhat inadequately) by HTML5 storage solutions. #1 is... well, that's an arms race, and apps will likely always be ahead here being closer to bare metal BUT we may get to the point where its not very important. And now we can go back to worrying whether robots will kill humans.

It seems like a pain but it is easy as pie. Unless my daughters are playing Angry Birds on my phone when I get prompted for the code...

I don't know if Picasa still does it, but the Windows Picasa client circa 2005 or so had a scrollbar like control but it stayed anchored in the middle, and when you pulled it down you went downwards, the further down the faster, and vice versa. This saved you the confusion of thinking your scrollbar represented where you were in the list, but added new confusion by co-opting a familiar control for a new purpose... not sure if it was a win, but I kind of liked it myself... In terms of the scrollbar indicating "how much more is there", I've noted that a lot of less advanced users don't have much comprehension of this. And in the Apple universe at least the scrollbar has gotten demoted significantly (since the start with iOS, now with Lion on OSX), not without controversy (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/11/computer_scrollbars_why_is_apple_eradicating_a_linchpin_of_user_interface_design_.html) I implemented endless pagination on http://unicodinator.com (which lets you scroll through Unicode 0000 to EFFF) and it works really, really well. The trickiest bit is to not only add content in the direction the user is scrolling towards quickly enough and far enough ahead that the user can't get ahead of you, but also to remove content in the direction the user is scrolling away from so as to not choke the browser. Luckily with this site the content is fully client side generated and is pretty lightweight. With some other projects that have to load dynamically getting all this timing correct is much more difficult to get perfect. Still, I think it's a really worthwhile technique...