I agree with all of these points, but I think we might need some other tool to solve them. Getting students up and running with Android Studio seems similar to

I agree with all of these points, but I think we might need some other tool to solve them. Getting students up and running with Android Studio seems similar to trying to teach HTML+CSS+JS, by having students start with Grunt/Gulp + WebPack/NPM + Ember + Bootstrap and more. We don't usually do that, because it's a crazy amount of complexity for someone just starting out. Most students begin with something like "edit a single HTML file to learn basic HTML+CSS+JS", and get gracefully introduced to the rest as they learn. I imagine we need an equivalent of that for Android. I don't know what specifically that would be, but it's probably not Android Studio.