Does 4mm of runout really mean the wheel was almost dead? I've seen plenty of wheels with that much side to side play that straightened out fine once you dealt with the tension, and three loose drive side spokes sounds more like the wheel was never tensioned right from the start than a pothole wrecking it. Sounds like you did good work, but a pothole alone usually doesn't kill a wheel that fast.

Man, the notebook thing sounds like punishment but you might be onto something. I had the same problem where copy pasting felt like watching someone do pushups, you see it but your arms don't get any stronger. There's actually some science behind this, writing stuff by hand forces your brain to slow down and process each piece instead of letting your eyes glaze over. The fact that your two errors were a missing colon and a flipped variable name is huge, those are actual syntax mistakes, not the total brain freeze kind where you just stare at the screen. I tried the paper thing once with HTML and gave up around line 15 because my hand hurt, but maybe I quit too early. Keep at it, sounds like the slow way is actually the fast way for you.