- If not nicotine, and with the apparent absence of MAOI drugs in RYO tobacco, then what have I been addicted to?
- With the lack of severity of my withdrawal, was I even addicted?
- Is it MAOI drugs and additives that other factory cigarette smokers have been addicted to?
- Are they mistaking the addiction to cigarette additives with the properties of nicotine? Have they convinced themselves that it is the nicotine that they crave, when it may be the additives instead?
- Does any of their difficulty stem from fear of discontinuation of the rituals of smoking?
Something else I want to mention is tar. When I smoked factory cigarettes, using the same ashtray for years, an accumulation of tar would build up on the place where the cigarette sat, and every so often I'd have to scrape it off. Oddly, when I switched to RYO
tobacco, this was never an issue. I used the same ashtray here at my desk for 17 years. Never had to scrape it once. I don't know how much science is behind it, but my anecdotal experience suggests that there is far less tar in RYO than the other kind of smokes. Any idea why this would be?
I'm not at all convinced that RYO tobacco is better to the degree you suggest. At a minimum it still has some additives, for example to stop moist tobacco from going mouldy. I hadn't thought about this much until one rolling tobacco brand tried selling a version that came dry and didn't have those preservatives (instead you make it moist yourself by, for example, wetting a filter tip and leaving it in the packet). As for the ashtray anecdotes, that may be more to do with how much smoke roll-ups give off when not being dragged on compared to cigarettes, and their tendency to go out when not being inhaled, rather than keep burning away. On that note, I certainly saw a tv program many years ago that talked about cigarette companies not wishing to change this property of pre-made cigarettes, even though such a change might prevent some 'unattended cigarette' house fires.
edit - oops I see that while I was composing this post, others beat me to it with the point about cigarettes not going out.
As for addiction and what we are addicted to, the thing I really like about
vaping is that I can separate all the different addictions and habits from each other, and choose to eliminate them one at a time (or keep one or two).
For example just over 12 weeks ago I stopped smoking roll-ups, after smoking them for the previous 22 years. I had dabbled with vaping a few times for a few years before then, so I kind of new what to expect, but I wasn't ready to give up roll-ups fully till this year (I always promised myself I'd never smoke again once I hit 40). So far I have managed to stop without any slip-ups at all, but certainly in the first week I could tell that the vape wasn't giving my body everything it expected, there was some mild withdrawal and adjustment going on. And I know it wasn't a lack of nicotine, because some days I was actually getting too much nicotine and feeling that sort of yucky instead. After a week or two that feeling passed, and now the vape is giving me everything I crave and expect. So now I am left with the pure habit side of inhaling, and a nicotine addiction. One week I experimented with having a second vape with a zero nicotine juice in it, and was quite surprised how long I could go without any physical nicotine withdrawal symptoms, much longer than I could ever go without a cigarette. I suspect that the habit of smoking may be a bigger addiction for me than nicotine, and will be experimenting on this front again soon.
One reason I had to stop using the eRoll (cigalike) was that in the truck, I once almost set fire to the end of it! 
