Hi Joel,
Looks like you are well on your way to having a nice backyard orchard (or three 
). Congratulations!
I agree w/ Drew that I wouldn’t do all that amending of a deep hole in your video, nor put an empty bucket at the bottom. It’s also a good idea to plant trees pretty shallow (although some staking may be required in areas where there is heavy wind).
Digging a big hole can have some benefit of loosening the soil. This really helps the roots take off. For me, it’s just not worth the time to loosen the soil by hand that much.
Vigor is kind of a mixed bag. And it depends somewhat on which types of fruits we are talking about. For peaches, I generally like a lot of vigor early on. As you know, peach trees, along with other fruit trees, have a juvenile stage they go through before they start really producing fruit.
I like to get through the juvenile stage as quickly as possible and get some size on the trees to get them to start producing something significant. After that too much vigor can be a drawback because it takes too much time pruning that excessive vigor. As the trees get older and really start producing heavy crop loads, vigor can drop off too much and the tree will start producing too many short unproductive shoots. That’s also when they really need some feeding.
For peaches excessive vigor doesn’t have a negative impact on fruiting. I’ve found the cultivar is the biggest factor on whether or not the tree will have an adequate bloom. Some varieties are very productive, and some not very.
With other types of fruit trees, excessive vigor can negatively impact fruiting, so you’ll want to be careful there.
I wouldn’t advise your methods on pear trees unless you are sure the cultivars are bullet proof against fireblight. It’s such a problem here, I spray apogee quite often to calm vigor down on my apples. For that reason, I never fertilize apples or pears here, but I’m using fairly vigorous rootstocks for those fruits.
Lastly, you will get better growth (your neighbor too, especially since he doesn’t do the amendments like you) if you kill the sod around your trees to the drip line. Peach trees (especially young ones) don’t compete well with sod.
As Drew mentions, you might also try pruning your trees a little lower. There is nothing wrong with big trees as long as there is space for them (and it looks like you have plenty of space) but there really isn’t a lot of reason to let them grow tall, except for esthetics . My mature trees are bigger than yours, but everything is reachable from the ground. This makes harvesting, thinning, pruning much more convenient.
