I'm not in the mood for enumerating problems that Apple probably won't fix in the next 10 years anyways. Some of my standard whines have existed for 10 or 20 years, on the Mac, Windows, KDE, and Gnome, so even pros are often not even aware of them, because they just don't know any better. Ignorance is bliss, I won't destroy that for you ^_^

But, here are some remarks in reply to previous comments:

"It should just auto-eject silently as you physically pull a device out of a card reader or USB slot." So it shouldn't care whether you do it in the correct way that ensures the integrity of your data, or in the wrong way that has a considerable chance of destroying the file system on that device? Sure, the OS could suppress its wratch and not bitch at you if you pull out something that hadn't been written to, but this would get you into the habit of just pulling everything out, and pretty soon you'll just pull out something that you aren't supposed to. And if something goes wrong (again, this isn't all that unlikely), you have to hope that you'll be able to piece the broken file system back together. Even if you know how to do this, it could cost you a whole day in which you can get no other work done.

"give me some sort of master cut-off switch keystroke similar to Ctrl-Alt-Del to wrest control back from whatever’s freezing the display or whatnot" You mean, like command-option-escape?

"Alt-F for File then O for Open is so very much quicker than mouse navigation" command-O is even quicker.

"Dock is useless." (paraphrasing multiple comments) You can't get rid of it out of the box, but you can edit some file and put it on the top border; when you set it to auto-hide, it's hidden behind the menu bar and won't bother you any longer. I never tried it, so I don't know how well this works in situations where the menu bar iteslf is auto-hidden.