@TuringEquivalent,
The following is a thought experiment that has just sprung from my head with very little censorship. Please do that for me.
The question Why is there something rather than nothing? presupposes the existence of something, thus making the phrase "rather than nothing" meaningless. We have another thread similar to this, on the question of the objectivity vs. subjectivity of reality. Imagine the world without cognizant beings. Would its reality in that case be as problematical as a "thing" in the absence of "thing-ers".
To me--at this moment at least-- "thingness" (like reality) is dependent on its properties for its experential reality. Imagine an apple absent all its possible "properties". What would an "apple" be without its shape, color, taste, chemical composition, nutritional value, etc. etc.? It's "it-ness) would be no more than an abstraction, a vacuous "thing", and this abstract "thingness" would be a purely human construction, a construction lacking all properties except, perhaps, its (conceptualized?) spatial extension.
Perhaps the same applies to "Reality". Any definition of it presupposes its existence (How similar is this to Anselm's Ontological Proof for the existence of God?) But, like, our apple, Reality's existence may be problematiccal without its properties. In this thought experiment it would be little more than a purely philosophical entity of which its experential value is no more than what humans construct and attribute to it, and the artificiality of such constructions is evidenced by the variety of forms it takes across the range of the world'scultures.