Are you sure about this? I don't have any illusions about my place in the universe. I'm a tiny speck of dust in the grand machine of reality, and I'm okay with this.
That's not always the case. Personally, I lean toward bisexual homoromantic. This kind of split attraction is probably more common than it seems, but we didn't have language or a concept for it until recently. I know several people who are asexual and have various romantic orientations.
Telegram already has all the pieces needed to add voice chat on all the platforms it supports. I wouldn't be surprised if eating Skype's lunch is part of their monetization plan.
This would all make sense if D2D were a publisher. It's a distributor like Smashwords. I doubt the hits are doing that much subsidizing. eBooks are tiny files, and storage is cheap. All they did was clean up the .doc file for one book and keep on Apple when they gave me trouble publishing another. That's what I meant by handholding the manuscript.
It's a no-brainer if their offering appeals to you. For me, it does not. I get the stuff they offer for free/cheap from other services, and they tend to have a better selection for my interests.
There are many excellent, paying science fiction/fantasy collections out there. You need to set yourself apart in a way that convinces people to trust their stories to you (who we know nothing about) instead of someone else.
Especially since the established collections prefer/require first publication. Why should we risk that you'll publish and fail to pay?
That data goofiness issue is pretty much use case #1 for Mechanical Turk. Pay a bunch of people a few cents to do a sensibility check on the data, collect 10 for each item, and put any that are less than 100% through another round.
Not even all that expensive. 10 cents each, 75,000 items, 10 checks each. $75,000 is quite a bargain for that kind of data validation.
It'd take a day or two.
(There's probably some horrible flaw with this idea)