All these are my hypotheses, I'd appreciate any comments / critiques. 

One might hypothesize that it's not the banks making it so difficult to qualify, it's your income level that's making it difficult.  

I did this to test some hypotheses, and get an education one way or another. 

Have you been down my road or are you just hypothesizing?  

Let's hypothesize the owner made the bare minimum mortgage repayments and then accumulated fees and interest and that mortgage is in the vicinity of $80,000.

You can introduce an appreciation factor if you wish (& many of the graybeard bay area REI often do), but it's not necessary using the numbers you hypothesized. 

Pic related, I lent on this house post-flip:My first words in this post were "excluding flippers," because you 100% can hypothesize that the flipper "drove up" the values of that house and that neighborhood.... however the neighbors (20 houses to the right and left on both sides of the street - 80 homeowners) should be sending "thank you" cards to the flipper, they all probably picked up at least 10% in terms of home value thanks to that flipper removing this chop shop blight from the neighborhood.

Any hypotheses on why this might be?

I'm sure you know the adage: there are 3 sides to a story the 2 opposing views, and the truth.It's my nature to read a lot of stuff, formulate my own hypotheses, and to test them.

I need to educate myself before hypothesizing about what I want, etc.