TLS. There are some curl wrappers but last time I checked they did not work
There's a few that don't work, but one works phenomenally well— CosmicToast/jurl is incredible (unless you're on Windows—the library as a whole does work on Windows but the build script doesn't have Windows instructions in it, you have to hack that yourself).
I am happy with https://github.com/pyrmont/churlish
What do you concretely mean by this? I use https://github.com/joy-framework/joy for all web stuff and can probably get your missing features in within the week.