1. Electrically, solar does feed your house first. It interconnects before the meter and into your main electric panel. The reason it doesn't work during an outage is because of regulations requiring solar to turn off during power outages so that electricians fixing downed lines don't have surprise power from random houses after they turn off the grid power.
2. If you want solar to work during an electric outage you need to install a battery backup that can feed it AC power and disconnect it from the grid during a grid failure. However, you need a pretty big battery to power a full house for a long time so it's generally cheaper and easier to have a gas generator backup if you are worried about this. Batteries are really just good for energy arbitrage purposes these days.
3. There are inverters that have an outlet that works during grid outages, even without batteries (https://www.sma-sunny.com/us/how-to-explain-secure-power-sup...). They generally cost the same
I wonder how many electric F-150s will get sold to people on the basis of using them as a whole-house battery.
I fully agree on your point of the lack of logic to grid-based solar. No doubt large scale facilities can be placed in better areas, be cheaper per watt, have higher uptime, are able to afford the more exotic power storage (dams for one).
Now, if it were me, I'd start with new construction designed around low power usage. LED lighting, efficient computers, chest freezer turned into a refrigerator, no electric heat or dryers or transfer fans for gas heaters. The sticking point would tend to be A/C but I think that can be mitigated via small house size, insulation, and use of efficient split systems. The smaller the electricity use the more tractable the problem.
If solar's just going to feed back into the grid, I might as well just let the utility companies manage it themselves. It's more efficient than anything I can do myself.
Unfortunately, it seems like the way solar works helps that goal much less than I'd like. I hardly need multiple kilowatts of power backing a single functional outlet that almost seems begrudgingly provided.
I'd be interested in anyone who has experience in perhaps managing to set their house up the way I describe, what magic words to Google or say to installers to talk about this, and how much more money it may have been.