I tried a MacBook touchpad in the Apple store and I didn't get what the fuss was about. It has that annoying feature where when you click the cursor freezes for some period of time, which stops you clicking on multiple things in quick succession. It didn't feel any more precise to me in terms of pointing. I realise it has gesture support that works in close harmony with OS features, but just in terms of pointing and clicking it was nothing special.
Open about:config and search for 'wheel'. There are ~50 options for tweaking scrolling, including one to disable smooth scroll and ones to tweak the scroll distance.
Is it possible to just 'hire more teachers' though? The teachers that I had in university didn't seem to be the type of people you could just hire more of.
Don't the two bits of code have completely different behaviour? And the code with the bitshift is undefined on negative integers (in C). So the bottom code could indeed be the "correct way to do it".