First, if you have 7 years to decide if you want to exercise it, then every stock option has risk-free upside regardless of the strike price. Without the 7-year rule then the upside isn't so clear cut, but that doesn't mean they are near worthless at all.
Second, companies really don't grow that quickly. Over a 1 or 2 year time horizon, even a really successful company will 2x-4x in value (and the common stock might grow even less than this). If the strike price was low on the original grant, the strike price will also probably be pretty low on the refresher grant. Especially at early stages of a company's life when the options are priced at essentially zero, even if you 5 or 10x the value, the strike price will still be very low.
When you have more established companies and higher strikes prices, it is less of an issue because there might be a shorter term path to liquidity which takes away risk of exercising without being able to sell the stock.
That said, your point about having 7 years to decide is entirely fair, and mostly negates that downside.
On the other hand, if it's an amount of options you can afford to exercise (e.g. 1k shares @ $5 = $5k… most people could scrap together the funds for that.), your profit is unlikely to be more that 2-5x, which likely would return $10k, and at the most $25k on your $5k investment. A lot of risk and trouble to go through for very little gain…
That said, with a 7+ year time period to exercise after leaving the company, it's not an issue
I'd consider lack of #1 and #2 as dealbreakers. Any company that doesn't allow early exercise is being unfair to early employees for no reason, and not providing basic cap table information makes stock options numbers impossible to value.
#3 is great, but it is much more progressive. I'd value a company's offer more highly if they offered this, but it wouldn't be a dealbreaker if the company didn't.
As for number #4, I think 10/20/30/40 vesting is way too bottom heavy. The problem is the employer can always fire you if they want, and if the company blows way up in value in 2-3 years, they might prefer to fire you than give you so much stock. This reportedly happened at Zynga so it isn't unheard of. You'd hope to never join a company with this type of leadership, but as an employee you don't have much power so it is good to be defensive about it. Maybe I wouldn't mind a minor tweak like 20%/25%/25%/30%, but I'd prefer 25%/25%/25%/25% with a culture of refresher grants to high performers (which accomplishes the same thing).
The difference between founder stock and employee stock options is already so large, I don't think option holders really need to make any concessions (like bottom heavy vesting) to get some common sense benefits to stock options.
It also is important to educate people about these differences. I hope that companies that do #1, #2 and #3 have a nice guide on their offer letters explaining why this is beneficial to potential employees.