Ryan,

These are some great points! We've observed a lot of these things in the process of teaching ROS here at Hopkins. Recently I put together a couple of ROS tutorials which are meant to get someone started really fast without concept overload, especially if they have little experience with the sort of open source development patterns commonly used in the ROS community.

Check them out, I haven't posted them on the wiki because I wanted to have a bit more control over how they're presented and to avoid the distraction of the other tutorials:

1. http://jbohren.com/articles/roscpp-hello-world

2. http://jbohren.com/articles/gentle-catkin-intro/

3. http://jbohren.com/articles/modular-ros-packages/

-j