Welcome to Eorzea!

Yeah, all games have their Pros and Cons. I tend to prefer FFXIV over WoW, Swtor, and ESO, some may disagree and each to their own - it's not everyone's cup of tea. That said, my 2 cents on your gripes:

1. You do get more abilities from 50-90 (some of which are just incredible to behold) though a lot of skills were removed and condensed in previous expansions - some like it for ease of play (and want it condensing further), others preferred having more - it's a no-win situation for the devs, but they do try to balance it a bit. That said, FF doesn't really use skill-trees like other MMO's so your chosen playstyle really comes down to the class you play and the abilities it provides. It's more rigid than other games, but you can play any class on your character and switch freely between them which other games don't allow.
2. I can kind of see where the devs went originally with this - it is an MMO and the idea was to promote the multi-player side with required instances. That said, they already have Trusts (NPC's that can replace playable characters in dungeons) from 70 onwards, which are been implemented for the base game and earlier expansions over the next few patches to make it more single player-friendly.
3. I've only levelled culinarian so far so couldn't really comment, saying that, I'm told Culinarian is the easiest craft to level so that may be why?
4. You can backup your settings to the cloud from the character select screen but doesn't allow applying it to alt characters. That said, I believe there is a way to do it for PC players by copying/pasting folders in the game directory.

There's a lot to discover in the game, I kind of envy you experiencing it all for the first time and I wish you well.