Re no. 12 - Agree, who could remember that order! I think what interests me is when the order deviates between English and German, I'll have to start paying more attention to those moments when I change it when translating.
Re. no. 11 - I had to turn my head to the wall the first time I saw the family name Stickler actually written down. Fortunately, it sounds different, so I didn't react when introduced. Etymonline says "stickler" came from a verb stickle (to mediate) which came from an Old English verb stihtan (to rule, arrange, order) that was cognate with the German stiften (to found, establish).
Re no. 10 - Yes, I wondered what to do about the commas too, there were none in the example, and that seemed right, so I left it the way it was -the whittling knife just serves as an extremely contrived illustration of what they mean by opinion, size, age, shape, etc.
The English comma rule is similar, if there are two adjectives before the noun, and noun and the adjective preceding the are conceived as a unit (silver whittling knife), no comma is used before the adjective. If two adjectives could be joined by "and", you separate them with a comma i (paraphrasing Chicago Manual of Style here).
So we would do the same with the Bavarian beer - if we think of it as a unit, we would leave Bavarian right before the noun, and no comma would precede it. A dark Bavarian beer.
The more I think about individual examples with more than 2 adjectives, the less certain I become about what is "unmarked" .
I also run into questions like, does the position of "fresh" depend on whether you think of fresh as young or fresh as refreshing (opinion)?
A delicious, fresh Bavarian beer. Sounds ok
A fresh and delicious Bavarian beer. Sounds ok
A fresh, delicious Bavarian beer. Does not sound so good. ( But why not??? Because "fresh and delicious" such a strong collocation that it can break the rule?)
I had a hard time with Selima's school bag too. Mainly because none of the translations for "heißgeliebt" I thought of sounded good to me (much loved, precious, treasured, cherished, dearly loved, much adored etc.) But what I got in the end (more phrased as I would have, than translated) fit the "rule"...
My best-ever, never to be relinquished big old grey schoolbag. Opinion-opinion-size-age-color-purpose-noun