There was an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike Rowe was recording the narratives in a hotel room by simply going under the blanket of his bed with the microphone. I'm sure there was additional tweaking production value, but this is good advice!
In addition to your points; I'm not a fan of sensationalist blog posts that start off with whining about how something is hard even though the 'about me' section states how awesome they are at writing code. This seriously just screams hey come read my blog!
Well, no. They suggest that the camera shake wasn't added in after the fact with postprocessing of an existing image -- or at least that the image was fairly high-res and blur was also added after the fact. He doesn't rule out that the whole video wasn't computer-generated, nor that the dude was running into a greenscreen, nor for that matter a green cable that was digitally altered out, or anything like that. Some of these would venture into "faked" as opposed to CGI -- a cable which did not need to be shopped out might be an example, although whether you could have a nice construction crane nearby to operate it would be a worthwhile question, since the video doesn't give it much place to hide and the larger it is the more dangerous it would be to hang someone off of it and then move it from point A to point B.
There is a very real possibility that the wing was pulled by a cable. The kite adapted is actually one of those ones you usually pull behind a boat and which glides you up into the air.
That's also something I haven't considered. Whether or not this was really done, if you wanted to create the same effect by faking it, you could do it at least in part by doing two different "takes" -- one where you pull the guy from the front and view with a camera behind him, and another where you pull the guy up from behind and view with the camera on his head. There is a blurry whitish splotch when he first gets air which could be a tree in the distance, but if you wanted to fake it, that could be a way to disguise the cable.
This would give a plausible way to fake the first and the last scenes, where you see the man from behind, as well as the "in the air" scenes where you just see from his perspective: you could in principle put him in a boom lift vehicle -- perhaps suspended from it or perhaps even just sitting in it -- and the image would look very similar.
The side-view shot would be much more difficult to fake.
His take off speed and the angle of attack for his wings looks suspect. As much as I want this to be real it looks like he is in a stall the moment his feet lift off the ground. I am looking at this from a traditional fixed wing aircraft view though so my views could be flawed.
Keeping in mind that there are exceptions, yes, this is a good mindset. Obviously, there may be things that wind up affecting annual reports if they aren't completed "tonight." It's important to remember that those are the exception, though.
