Stars don't have a lot of ways of being different. They can differ slightly in initial chemical composition, but this makes negligible difference to how they behave—no star begins with more than a percent or so of anything but hydrogen and helium, and these two elements are always in close to the same 3:1 proportion that came out of the Big Bang. Stars mainly differ in mass and in age. There's an aging track that essentially all stars follow as they fuse their hydrogen into helium, with a bunch of late-stage branch points depending on mass. Give an astrophysicist a star's mass and age, and she can usually tell you almost everything about it. Stars can differ somewhat in how fast they are rotating, but this doesn't make much difference unless they are spinning quite unusually fast, because at stellar masses gravity easily dominates centrifugal effects. The only thing I can think of that can make a star evolve differently from the standard time track is interaction with another close star. A star is more likely than not to have a neighbour close enough to affect its motion, but it's rare for two stars to come close enough to affect each other's structure.
I don't know about our sun being unusually quiet for a star. Some stars do seem to produce massive flares that could rip away planetary atmospheres. Big solar flares are a magnetic phenomenon; stellar magnetism is due to convection; and convection is a bigger factor in smaller stars (because at the higher temperatures inside larger stars, heat is mostly carried by radiation). So the fact that our sun is magnetically calmer than a lot of stars is not really a separate fact from its being larger than all the many small stars—it's just a consequence of that same fact.
Extremely few other stars are going to be exactly like our sun, but any star with close to its mass, and around roughly its age, will be quite similar to it. The moderate scarcity of G class stars, among all stars, is just an indication of how common it is to have around a solar mass and be somewhere in stellar middle age. Somewhere between 5 and 10% of stars are G class. It's a fuzzy number because it's hard to know how many of the smallest stars exist. Small, cool objects are hard to see, and if you can see them, it can be hard to be sure whether they are stars or large gas planets.
There are still an awful lot of stars like our sun out there. If our star is like 1 in 10 stars, that's hardly a big enough fluke to make us think it had a lot to do with our planet developing life. Maybe it did, but as evidence that it actually did, the relative rarity of mid-sized, middle-aged stars like our sun is only going to nudge the betting odds a little bit. It's not a strong argument for anything.
Not having any big planets in small orbits is probably not at all an unusual feature of our solar system. It's just an unusual feature among the extrasolar planetary systems that we have been able to detect, because our detection methods select very strongly for large planets in small orbits. In particular our reliance on transiting—the planet crossing our line of sight to the star—really dramatically favours large, closely orbiting planets.
I've been disappointed by how hard it is to find any discussion, on otherwise authoritative websites, of how rare transit is and how severely this skews our data on exoplanets. Sometimes someone admits that transit is "rare", but they never seem to give any percentages to say just how rare it is. A little bit of geometry, though, seems to show that the odds of an orbit being edge-on enough for a transit are the ratio of the star's diameter plus the planet's diameter to the diameter of the planet's orbit. So it would take about a 0.5% fluke for the Earth-like orbit of an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star to show up in transit. 40-odd light years from here there is a little red dwarf with seven planets orbiting edge-on to us (the
TRAPPIST-1 system); their smallest orbit radius is 100 times smaller than ours, while the star has about a tenth the diameter of our sun, so they are only about a 5% fluke—no big surprise to find one of them among the seventy or so star systems within that distance from us.
Because of its dependence on transiting, terrestrial exoplanet astronomy is polling with sampling fractions around or below a few percent, and a strong bias for small orbits.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
