And it's absolutely true that when Apple adds a new feature, it must have an accompanying slow animation tween to sell it. Frustrating.
Wifi status in menu bar: left and right click on the icon do the same thing. To get the advanced menu you need to option click the icon.
Audio status in menu bar: left and right click do the same thing. To get the advanced menu you need to option click the icon. Additionally, 'scrolling' on the audio icon does not change the volume.
By comparison, Microsoft achieved near-perfection in mouse design with the venerable Wheel Mouse Optical 1.1a. After more than a decade, that mouse is still perfectly usable for competitive gaming. Contemporary high-end mice from companies like Steelseries and Zowie imitate the shape of the WMO very closely, because it's exceedingly comfortable for a wide range of grip styles and hand sizes.
Apple has always produced mice that have at most one physical button, while providing in the OS to support third-party mice that have more. This isn't something that started with Ive. There are plenty of people who think Apple should produce mice that have more than one button throughout its history.
Having used all of these mice extensively, primarily in desktop publishing and programming environments, I haven't found any of the issues you mention a problem. That's not to say others haven't. I enjoyed using the Magic Mouse in particular. I never had any ergonomic issues with any of them, other than the Apple USB mouse.
You mention gaming, and I can see how none of Apple's mice would be good for this. And it's great that there are third-party companies producing great mice, and have been for a long time. (Speaking of Microsoft, I've heard great things about their keyboards as well.) Given my (admittedly personal) experience with Apple's mice, I find the phrasing "consistently awful" to be hyperbole and unwarranted. That's not to say they're the best. There's a wide range between "near-perfection" and "consistently awful".
Gaming is the extreme case for mouse use, but it's not an edge case. A good gaming mouse is simply a good mouse - not a puck that you push around the desk, but an extension of your hand with a sensor underneath. eSports gamers simply demand an excellent sensor and high-quality switches in an ergonomic package.
https://mionix.net/mice http://zowie.benq.com/en/product/mouse.html
They really started screwing up the core UI with just adding things for the sake of adding things.
I wonder if you mean standard-duration animations or their really-slow variations. Adding Shift to any OSX hotkey that involves animation will slow it down 20x or so (e.g. Cmd+Shift+F3). I guess it was originally introduced for show-off purposes, but it's weird how that still exists.
If you do the wrong thing on any computer system and I'm sure something unexpected would happen.
I'm not saying that "you're holding it wrong", nor do I know 100% what you're talking about, but I don't think its entirely fair to complain like that about a computer system that you're not using 'correctly'.
This is the same bullshit Apple has been doing with Mac OS X. I'm typing away in the terminal, doing something extremely productive, and suddenly my UI locks up for a second and I realize "shit, I must have accidentally timed a modifier key wrong and now I'm entering some crazy Mac mode" and then all of my windows fly around and I have to figure out how to get back to my terminal. I honestly don't understand why anyone wants any of these features, and if I did want them I'd want them to be super fast without the crazy slow animations, as every second I'm staring at them is a second I'm not working :/.
The one thing I can say is: just like on the Mac, you can turn most of this shit off on iOS. Essentially, they pretend that the only reason people would ever want to have an advanced option on iOS is because they are disabled, and so they hide everything under "Accessibility". You can turn off "3D Touch" and "Reachability" there. I'm not sure which edge swipes you hate, but if it is the one from the bottom, "Control Center" can be turned off (it is a top-level settings panel, turn off both "Access on Lock Screen" and "Access Within Apps"). You can also configure a lot about auto-correction under General/Keyboard.