O.K., so what did I do wrong?

[Mr. 16 gauge]

I thought that this year I would try raising some game birds for dog training...pigeons are now quite difficult to get, and I don't want to shoot my homers.
So I decided to raise a few quail. I bought a Hovabator incubator, read up on the process with books and the internet, and bought some quail eggs (English whites....they are a variety of corturnix quail). I chose these as they are a bit bigger quail and matured faster.
To make a long story short, only 4 eggs out of 29 hatched! I am so bummed!

I got my eggs from a place in OK that has been in business for a while, so I don't think that the "pulled a fast one" and sent me a bunch of bad eggs. I got them at the beginning of the month 4 days after they were shipped, and I set them aside 'to settle' for 24 hours like most of my sources said to do. I then put them in the incubator (in the automatic egg turner, so they were turned throughout the process) that had been pre warmed, waited the 17 days. I kept careful track of the temperature via a digital thermometer (temp never went about 101.6) and kept track of how many days they were in the incubator. Two days prior to them hatching, I removed them from the egg turner (again, as my sources suggested), then waited....and became disappointed.
I left the lid on an refrained from opening the incubator in order to keep the temp constant. The only thing I think I didn't do correctly was keep track of the water for he humidity......I saw that it was dry about half way through the process, and filled it up immediatley. I had rigged up a piece of tubing with a larger syringe so I could fill the hopper without opening the lid. Unfortunately, the hopper is clear plastic, so it gave the impression that it was filled (optical illusion)....I solved that problem with a little bit of blue food coloring.
Anyway, I will give them a few more days, but I think that the rest of the eggs are dead. I will cut them open later to see what stages of development the embryos are in.
Do you think that the lack of humidity or long shipping time (I thought that they would be shipped overnight) was the cause of my poor hatch, or might I Have done something else wrong?
Thanks in advance...........