Personally I've been using FastSpring and 0 problems so far. 
  However they only work with apps, not webapps and such.

By all means they work with web apps: http://saasy.com (it's a FastSpring brand).

  PayPal, PayMill, Braintree etc are all 3rd party payment
  processors. So I don't quite understand your distinction.
  I believe FastSpring may mean you avoid having to get a
  merchant account directly so perhaps that's the
  difference you see?

The main difference is that FastSpring acts as a reseller. One of the consequences being that Europe based startup doesn't need to handle VAT - technically it's selling to the US.

  The biggest objection I've heard is the 9% flat rate they 
  take vs 3% and 30 cents per transaction that you'd roughly 
  see from a payment processor.

Well, it's not cheap but we have EU regulators to thanks for it - not having to deal with VAT can be worth the price in some cases. And when a company grows, it can optimize in the payments area.

Previous launch attempt last saturday was in day light.

Yeah, but isn't it that the premise of the article is that you would combine energy from various multiple sources like, I don't know, 10-30 per house? Water flowing in pipes, generated heat, gathered kinetic energy?

It would be interesting to see some calculations how much could be gained that way.