One problem, at least, is that I don't think you are truly engaging with the scientific explanations as well as you think you are. Any analysis of science that is restricted to reading a book written for the layman misses out the massive amounts of mathematical justification for those claims. Once you follow, and understand, that mathematics, then it becomes rather a lot easier to appreciate why Hawking et al claim what they do.
To take an example at random: why do you think these scientists keep referring to "nothing" as really a little bit of "something"? It's because you will find, again and again, that every time you write down a theory for the structure of the Universe, or for the behaviour of gravity, that theory will almost force you to concede the idea that nothing -- in the most literal sense -- is an impossible state to achieve, or at the very least an impossible state to maintain.
Consequently, the assertion that the origin of the Universe is about creating "something from nothing" is rejected just as much by scientists as from you. To insist that scientists are saying this, so that you can ridicule them, is to misunderstand their argument.
To be sure, the exact mechanism for the origin of the Universe remains -- and, perhaps, may always remain -- a mystery. But, once you recognise the near-universal truth of physics that "something always happens", then the spontaneous emergence of the Universe at all is, at least, no longer surprising.