No worries, it happens to all of us at times.
And I've been thinking about your point #4:
Shouldn't getting Taken Out by hunger be hard? I think the only time we've seen it happen was in Turn Coat, and that was under some truly extreme circumstances.
I have some thoughts on that. :) I'll spoiler tag this though since we're getting into book specifics.
Thomas's loss of control in Turn Coat feels like he was already taken out and the Skinwalker chose to give him an extreme consequence rather than killing him. (Extreme consequences: Absolutely great implementation, by the way!) That's not about Thomas being so strong minded that he can go multiple scenes without feeding. He was already taken out, and the Skinwalker could choose what happened to him.
I think a better situation to look at is Blood Rites, when they head back to the Raith estate. He'd fed earlier in the adventure, so as far as we know, he's not suffering any stress. Yet, we see him come within a hair of killing Justine after a single fight. Assuming Taken Out means he would have killed Justine, then clearly he wasn't taken out here. But stress on the track never forces a character to feed. To model that, in the system as written I'd assume that he applied a severe or moderate consequence and had it and his high concept compelled.
Lara, in Turn Coat, also feels like someone whose hunger reached the 'taken out' stage. Harry didn't want to stay anywhere near her.
I suppose it all comes down to what Taken Out means. If we think of it as the equivalent of dying (he's permanently a mindless creature), then yeah, it should be hard. If it means "lost control until he's fed and killed" then I'd argue it should be a little easier to get there on a hunger check, because we've seen Thomas come close a number of times. And by close, I interpret that in game terms as having bought out of it with fate points or by invoking aspects to succeed on the discipline check.
When it comes down to it, I'm just fine with modeling hunger temptation as a compel against high concept or a feeding related consequence. But if I'm doing that, then the hunger stress track doesn't feel interesting to me. It has very little in-game effect other than forcing the loss of powers -- but the very lack of those powers makes the next hunger check easier to make, which resets the stress track. If stress had an effect on discipline checks, or if there were more mid-fight causes of hunger stress, then I could see it as more interesting or useful. If the amount of stress had an effect on whether a character could stop feeding (that is, it influenced discipline checks), that's interesting too.
In fact, I think I see what's bugging me: typically, the stress->consequences->taken out pattern is something that happens in as part of a conflict. Stress is supposed to be the stuff that disappears between scenes. Hunger is implemented as stress, but is special cased to be persistent...and it gets added after the scene finishes. Which means, to a great extent, that the reaction to a bad hunger check is going to become the scene that follows any fight.....and since this should happen immediately, no one else has had a chance to recover. Effectively, it becomes an extension of the previous scene, rather than part of that scene. If you constantly incurred stress during a conflict, it might look and feel too much like spellcasting. But those parallels are there. Harry incurs stress each time he casts a spell, getting closer to exhaustion. Thomas, Lara and Susan incur stress mid-fight and lose more and more control.
An idea I'm considering as a house rule: If you have a feeding dependency and you use both a power AND invoke an aspect on the same roll, incur 1 hunger stress.
The shorter version: Compels are more interesting to me than the hunger stress mechanic, because compels happen as a scene is played out, while hunger seems like a mechanical thing that's applied after the scene is over. That implies to me that there's something wrong with the hunger stress track, because in building stories, the scene is the interesting part, not the bookkeeping. It should matter whether Thomas/Lara/Susan is hungry during the scene, not after it.
I looked again at Emotional Vampire, not sure I see anything that changes my thinking. Feeding Frenzy is the only thing that stands out, and it doesn't specifically speak to losing control when Hungry -- it is about being in the right emotional situation with a WILLING target.
The healing section doesn't seem relevant to Blood Rites -- he's not dying, he's consumed by the hunger.
Page references are the paperback.
p. 137 "He's breathing but he's emptied his reserves."
p. 146 "The bullets aren't going to kill him. He'd have died already. The Hunger may finish him though"
p. 147 "Right now Thomas is too hungry that he can't think. Can't move. He'll be all right once he feeds."
and "He's too hungry," Lara said. "He won't be able to control himself."
Arguably, all of these are statements from Lara, who is not impartial. And while this sounds like very much like the poster child for being "taken out" from hunger, clearly, Thomas is able to come back from the edge to avoid killing Justine. So is that tagging a Justine aspect to just barely avoid killing her, or was he just barely not "taken out" ?
I could see an argument that what Justine did in Blood Rites IS to act as a willing target.
I can live with the explanation that the stress track takes out powers because to use them would cause the vamp to lose control. It'd be nice to see it described a little better in the rules. I'd love to see a billy/harry sidebar or something. :)