For extra "huh?" about your uncle, you might be interested to know that there is no Amazon.dk. If you're in Denmark and want to buy books from Amazon, you have to go through one of the British, German, French, US etc branches. So as far as I know, they don't even have an official Danish top ten list. If there is an unofficial one, you probably don't have to sell a huge amount of books to get on it. (And generally speaking Danes, like all Scandinavians, tend to be pretty secular and irreligious - of course, there are always tiny minorities who make up for it by being extra devoted.)

And yeah, I pretty much agree with your irk factors. All of them can probably be done well - I'm firmly convinced that there's no trope that's universally awful - but damn, they're overused and very hard to get right.