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Thank you for the documentation link, I will fix it.

Regarding your question, let me go backwards — I promise, it makes sense. When you go to Manage Backups and you have a backup record you want to restore but the file is on S3 you can click on the Manage Remote Files button and click on the button to fetch it back to your site. That's the intended way to use archive files stored on S3.

Then, what is the Import from S3 for? There are two use cases I had in mind.

One is that you have deleted the backup record i.e. it no longer appears in the Manage Backups page. In this case you need to go and fetch the archive from S3. While you could do it manually on your computer, then upload it to your server, then use Import it made a bit more sense to have it all done in one go, especially given the fact that S3 is considered the remote storage option for backup archives in Akeeba Backup.

The second use case is that you've backed up your site on S3 and you have a new hosting account with Joomla pre-installed. Instead of having you remove the site, upload Kickstart Pro, import the archive from S3 using Kickstart blah blah I let you just install Akeeba Backup Pro, use Import from S3 to import the backup archive and use the integrated restoration. This use case made a lot of sense in 2010 when mobile devices couldn't do FTP / SFTP very efficiently (and iOS didn't have local file storage at all). Nowadays? I guess it still kinda makes sense but it's not that much different to do even from a mobile device — I have certainly done that with an iPad Pro using nothing but Transmit and Safari on it.

In short, Import from S3 does not really have a very good use case. It made far more sense 11-12 years ago when I needed to transfer sites between hosts using an iPad and couldn't really manage files locally. Nowadays its utility is questionable but some people have integrated into their workflows so I won't remove it for the foreseeable future.

SFTP and FTP are not very good choices for transferring files between servers. First of all, not all servers support downloading a specific range of bytes. If this feature is unavailable you end up with a PHP timeout trying to import the files. Moreover, our experience is that people are far more likely to get confused setting up the FTP / SFTP connection information and hosts are far more likely to block FTP / SFTP connections to the outside world than they are blocking HTTPS requests (what Amazon S3 uses).

Also keep in mind that Kickstart Professional does offer an Import from URL and an Import from S3 feature. The former may work great for you in lieu of import from FTP/SFTP. Put the files in a web accessible folder and give Kickstart the URL of the .jpa, .jps or .zip archive. It will download all archive parts into the server it's running on. 

> A second question if I may, sometimes the kickstart has prepopulated the config information but sometimes I have to type it in. Is there a way to use kickstart to populate the data from the config file every time?

Kickstart only extracts the backup archive and does not pre-populate anything.

ANGIE is the backup restoration script.

ANGIE does populate its fields from the configuration except for the database information. The database information, as documented, will only be populated if you are restoring to the same location as determined by the full domain name (subdomain(s), domain, TLD). If you are restoring to a different location it will be empty by default. This is intentional. There is a very large number of people who thought that ANGIE could magically reconfigure their database server with the same hostname(!), username, password and database name when, in fact, it is the user who has to provide this information. Therefore, when you are likely to need to enter different information than what is stored at backup time you get blank fields in the database restoration page.