I purchased a System 76 laptop at the beginning of this year and I have had many issues with it. The most vexing thing is that support has not generally been helpful, dragging out the trouble shooting and diagnosis of a hard lockup and loss of network connectivity over the course of several months.

I had much better reliability and service for my Dell that shipped with linux, but they don't seem to do that anymore. For the OP, I would recommend just getting another macbook, as it seems to meet the majority of the requirements well without depending on a small company that may or may not be able to provide adequate support.

That would mean losing my seemingly limitless supply of folding material.

http://spencerandbrown.com/mbb/origami/buscard/

You may be able to use an app like appbrain to easily reinstall the apps you have now. I do not know for sure, as I have not tried it, but it may be an option worth looking in to. I think there may be a way to get appbrain to selectively move apps over from the old configuration to the new one and, if properly configured, automatically install them. Again, do your own research to be sure.

The tricky part is making sure you have a copy of any data/configuration you wanted to keep.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to the Body Farm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Tennessee_Anthropological_Research_Facility

It was actually 49.7 days.

Sorry I'm late, but you might want to look into Everything.
http://www.voidtools.com/

Are you just documenting the supporting evidence that they are, in fact, a hiring manager?