Non sequitur. It does not follow from your argument that there is nothing to be learned from the Estonian model.

If nothing else, it's a shining example of what can be achieved when a collective effort is put into modernizing digital infrastructure, i.e. putting a little -- otherwise [economically] unremarkable -- baltic country on the economic map. Moreover, this comes at a time during which there is much discussion of the US (and several European countries') aging infrastructures, and in which the economic opportunity of modernizing them is being scrutinized.

Granted, this kind of transformation may or may not be possible elsewhere, but to brush it aside as "uninteresting" is to suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity.

Also, it helps that it's a tiny country (1.3 million citizens), so providing IT infrastructure is dirt cheap.

A country's size cannot be overstated. I don't know about cost, but for mere agility, the smaller a country is, the more nimble it can be for all sorts of reform and progressive progress. Singapore and the Netherlands are both small countries that have managed to overhaul aspects of society without much barrier in years past. Germany is a big place, the U.S. much bigger. Estonia, tiny. You can do all sorts of things when you have just a few people it will affect.

It's the other way around. Remember, countries pay for R&D independent of the number of people in it, but they only get taxes relative to their population. So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT or deal with worse systems.

What's going on is larger counties made the jump sooner so small countries have many examples to learn from.

  So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT

That... or just import IT that was already developed elsewhere.

Nobody sells 100% of IT in a box for an arbitrary country, off the self, zero customization required. Now, they can import things like operating systems, routers, word processors, etc, but so can large counties. And even then localization may not work out of the box.

Remember, things like local tax laws are not going to simply reflect some other country's rules 100% of the time.

Let's be frank, R&D costs are not the problem here.

Fewer citizens also means smaller budget, how does that help?

Economies of scale would make the opposite true.

Population density is probably the important factor. Small countries tend to have a higher population density which makes infrastructure cheaper.

I have no idea if that's true in general, but, in this case, Estonia is the one with the lower population density.