Am I crazy for considering switching from TestFlight to HockeyApp mainly because HockeyApp actually charges for the service?

No, absolutely not. With free products, you are the customer. I don't like this idea either. Also, HockeyApp is far superior to TestFlight. They had In-App-Updates at launch day.

I don't understand why news outlets are making such a big deal of this. Amazon have offered software downloads for a while now. Previously it was just Windows software; now they also have Mac software. It is not like it is unprecedented for a website to offer Mac software downloads.

I think one reason it's news is because people have predicted that Adobe CS and Office will never be on the Mac App Store. If there's a competing store that does offer such titles a few big titles like that are enough to give it some steam. And it's Amazon so they already have steam.

It means Amazon has failed at properly marketing their software download center thing, I'd say ;)

If I'm not mistaken, innovative is a synonym of novel.

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines novel as "new or unusual in an interesting way". While it may not be new, it's definitely unusual.

(Also, you're not mistaken, according to the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. But they are different words.)

You probably should have continued reading. Given the context I'm pretty sure that the author meant "Even though I hadn't...". See this quote a few lines later:

"Now, one year later, after writing 8622 lines of code in Scala"