Yep, In my experience a community of Amish people an hour away from each other can be radically different. The more laid back communities tend to be filled with hardworking and nice people. While the conservative ones can be pretty dystopian.

Yeah, I kind of assumed that would probably be the case, and while this kind of reasonable approach to technology, that was highlighted in the book, sounds pretty nice in theory, it does put a lot of power into few hands, which historically (and unfortunately) never works very well.