It was mainly a reaction to my typo that I am much too stubborn to edit.
Honestly, your mistake was not that big a deal, even to a person like me who gets touchy about writing mistakes. Everybody has words they switch up, mispronounce, or spell wrong, because the English language is nothing but contradictory rules and exceptions to them. Switching two rarely-used words out of over a million is something every author does sometimes. I wasn't at all trying to imply that doing so once made you a bad writer (although now that I'm rereading what I wrote from that perspective I can see why it came off that way), just to show that a fairly minor mistake can distract the reader enough that it takes away from the (otherwise solid) quality of your writing.
The problem I see with a lot of aspiring writers (and I explained this badly) is with the people who really have no idea about writing on a technical level (sentence structure, verb agreement, consistent word misuse, etc). The occasional mistake is fine (even prolific authors like Robin Hobb have books that, once or twice, confuse "lay" and "lie" or "me" and "I," which is distracting but not enough to derail the whole story), but it's when it shows up over and over again in a single chapter that I find it objectionable. I don't have my Kindle in front of me, but one of the self-published ebooks I was referring to not only never used "said," but started almost every sentence the same way (e.g. "Thomas went to the door," then "Thomas picked up the knife," followed by "Thomas stared at the milk."). A single writing workshop, critique group, writing class, or even a second reader should have pointed out the need for sentence variety, but the author either didn't put in the effort or didn't listen to criticism. That's the type of apathy towards educating one's self about writing that bothers me.
On another note, based on how terrible some commercially published authors are, I dread the day that I read these independently published books you speak of.
According to Sturgeon's law, "90% of everything is crap." I suspect that's equally true of commercially published fiction and self-published fiction, but I can't help but think that the combined efforts of editors and agents at least make the commercial crap a little better than the unfiltered stuff I keep finding on Amazon. Or maybe I just want to think that because I'm paying $7.99 for one and $.99 for the other. :)