I think there are two different answers, one for the first 10 amendments, and one for the rest: To understand our love for the first 10 (the bill of rights), y

I think there are two different answers, one for the first 10 amendments, and one for the rest: To understand our love for the first 10 (the bill of rights), you have to understand the context in which they came into being. The US constitution was a positive document, written to grant powers to the US federal government with the implied understanding that all powers not granted to the federal government were reserved for the states or for the people. Immediately after ratification, the Federalists began to push for more and more powers for the federal government. The constitution's positive nature had a major flaw--it assumed a good faith understanding that the federal government should be as limited as possible, and that unstated powers were necessarily beyond the intended scope of the government. In the absence of that good-faith understanding, the powers of the federal government could (if only in bad faith) interpret the powers of the federal government quite broadly. To rectify this problem, the first ten amendments (collectively known as the "Bill of Rights") were passed. These are 'negative' in nature, in that they explicitly lay out things which the government cannot do. The nature of the constitution as a generally 'positive' document, where things not listed are not to be assumed to be powers of the government, which was only implied before the bill of rights, was formalized in the 10th amendment. The rest of the amendments are kind of a grab-bag. To understand why we focus on them, consider that the original constitution is only ~4,500 words long! And from that short document, all constitutional questions were to be answered! These questions are generally answered by the US Supreme Court's 'interpretation' of the constitution, including amendments and its own case law. Generally, amending the constitution is a for the people to decide specific constitutional questions for themselves, rather than relying on SCOTUS to extrapolate from a small body of black-letter law and case law. The fact that there is more focus on these amendments is, when you think about it, almost tautological. If a constitutional question really matters, we can take it into our own hands and answer it via constitutional amendment. If it doesn't matter all that much (or we can't agree enough to pass a constitutional amendment), we have to rely on SCOTUS to answer the question.