I sense some real frustration here.
Honestly I really like the take lane system for audio. I never really got how it was fundamentally different from layers either but it fits my workflow.
My midi editing needs are modest these days. I play most stuff and fix small bits here and there. The (for me) incidental oddities are annoying but I get around them.
The main thing I get from this thread that I wholeheartedly agree with is that I wish here would be a better way to manage the relationship between the PRV and the selected/opened clip in track view. If I double click a clip and edit it in PRV, I would prefer to ONLY see that clip and have all my edits constrained to that clip. Any clip management I want to do (merge, etc) should happen in track view where I can actually see and manage clips. If I want to move notes from one clip to another, let me cut them from one, open the next clip and paste them there. Right now it's completely unclear where your edits will end up. Even a simple clip boundary indicator (or different colors?) in PRV would be something.