> I also spent a little time on redirecting the addresses of [...] my old website to [...] the new one. Failing to do this would have cost me a lot in search engine rankings since all the incoming links collected over the years would be gone [...]

I was disappointing that the main reason that they valued keeping past links alive was SEO. To me the innate benefit of not breaking links and bookmarks on your readers (or future readers) should be enough.