Hey, it's the Author here.. You don't have to be very technical with that.. There are plenty of tutorials, some are "official" in the Tor Project website, and some not. Unfortunately you have to reply to these e-mails otherwise they may follow up or see that you never reply and follow other means of contacting you. Truth be told, I don't know. I've just read some info on their website.
Well, you can contribute, and it will only cost you about 5$ / month! Tor, by design, has some latency issues, and can also have exit node bottlenecks. I think people only run intermediate relays because of a "myth" that you'll get raided at 4 am if you run one. It has happened in the past to some operators, however, in this blog, I wanted to show that it's not always that way.
This has been done in the past: researchers visited a uniquely generated URL from Tor and then recorded which Exit Nodes visited it again. You can find their work if you google it..
There are some providers who "buy" their blacklists from other companies that specialize in that. They essentially get a list of X IP Addresses / Subnets and they blindly block them. Providers compete to generate the "largest blocklist" with "the most bad guys", and therefore end up adding any IP Address they can find. Tor has been used by criminals at least once, therefore any address related to it must be bad, right?
Like some other comments, you can find people who run tor relays and accept donations (TorServers being my personal choice), however, very few are willing to run exit nodes.
Well, it's fun to do this and learn from that, however in an exit node it's not something I'd want to do. People use Tor to surf the web anonymously (mostly) and have some privacy. There are certainly exit nodes that do this, and it has been proven by blog posts in the past, however the more nodes that don't engage in such activities, the better for the network overall.