[Q] Building a ROM topic

Hello all.

I have recently tried my hand at building a ROM for the KF. I figured it would be good to give back to the KF community. I have attempted to follow online guides. I have attempted to follow ROM specific guides. Success has, so far, eluded me.

I have tried CM11, AOSP, CM12, CM11 again (this time following CM's guide), and Carbon, which, after just downloading, I found doesn't even have the otter/otterx as a build option. Every attempt has resulted in errors such as: jdk version errors, jdk supplier errors (Sun/openjdk), missing files, missing folders, internal compiler errors, make forking/memory allocation errors, and missing device specific files.

In case it matters, I've tried Sun JDK 1.7, OpenJDK 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8, and GCC 4.8 & 5.1. The internal compiler errors were probably from RAM errors, though I think I still got one after the RAM issues were solved.

My questions:
What secret, dark magic spell do I need to incant before attempting to build? IOW, why does this never work for me?
How do I make an unofficial build of a ROM that doesn't have support for the KF (everything except CM and AOSP)?
Where/how do I get the KF kernel, drivers, appropriate make files, and dependency files to build those unofficial ROMs?
How much RAM + swap do I actually need to build this, I currently have 4GB?
And, does anyone know what Hashcode changed from the KK to the LP kernel to fix the battery drain issue? I would like to learn this so that perhaps it could be adapted back to the KK kernel, but I need to be able to successfully build something first.

Thank you.