Hi Jeremy,

thank you very much for your fantastic reply. I wasn't expecting to get so many answers and information in 1 post! 

Also I'd like to appologies if I came across a bit harsh or negative in my previous post. I really didn't mean to, far from it. Like I said, I'm very glad I found out about TKL and very impressed by the quality of the appliances, the Hub services and the TKL web site in general. Now enven more so that I know there's only 2 core developpers on the project!

As for my questions and your answers...

• cli power tools - I was reffering to what's documented in the TLK-Core decription. I'd like to know more about what's been improved and what extra stuff can be accomplished with the additions. So far I can see the improvement to the shell colors and the auto-completion feature which are great but I'm not sure what the other features provides.
• username/password setup through inithooks - I think I wasn't very clear and somewhat mislead you. I did get the prompts to setup the passwords to the accounts during the first boot of the appliance and everything went fine. I was just expressing my wish to also have the option to choose a username for the various accounts. Now, I undersand the design choice for the appliance and the minimalistic approach to the install and setup experience. I just think that adding the options to also choose the usernames and the machine hostname would still fit the bill. But like you said it's pretty easy to change those after the initial setup. I certainly can live with that. Maybe some howtos on those specific tasks should be added to the How To section or maybe having a specific TKL patch for those who'd like to have this extra flexibility available. I'm still not sure how patches work or how to create one but once I do I'd gladly help with that (same goes for the documentation).
• Documentation - Being a developper myself, I perfectly understand how often documentation can be left behind as an afterthought or how easy it can be pushed aside to give more priority to extra features or fixes. So I'm not judging at all. I was merelly trying to suggest where the focus should be put IF/WHEN documentation efforts were to  be contributed. I'm perfectly aware though that the needs of the TKL community might be different then mine.
• root account - I'm not a security expert and was basing my assesment only on what I've been using so far (Ubuntu) and my limited understanding of the benefits of using sudo. Seeing the choice made by TKL I was curious to see why the choice had been made. After searching arround on the forums and the documentation the only explanation I could find was a post by one of the dev making it sound like it was mostly a convenience thing. That is what motivated my questionning. Thanks to your inputs and explanations the decision makes a lot more sense and I realise that my worries about security were misplaced. As for the convenience benefits, I'm not sure I can agree yet... I'm just so used to type sudo <some command> that I keep typing it even though I don't need to! Also thanks for the instructions on how to install sudo back. :)
• AWS - You inderectly provided the answer: AWS free tier is for a micro instance so it's not compatible with TKL Hub as it needs a small instance. It's now also confirmed since yesterday's announcement of the release of version 1.0 of the Hub. I'm still tempted to try it out but I don't want to overspend too much. I'll try to find more info on what's the minimal AWS component that I need to run a simple wordpress appliance and see if it's worth it.

Once again thank you for your reply it's very much appreciated.