Two comments for the OP.
On your point number 5. The volume knob is actually velocity sensitive. The faster you turn it, the more it moves. So you could spin it slowly but around a whole turn and the volume might only go up a bit, if at all. You could also spin it just a quarter turn, but quickly, and it would change the volume a lot more.
I have a number of really different sounding guitars, and if I find a profile I like, but the eq is not what I'm looking for. Sometimes I'll dink around with all the deep editing features to try to get it where I want it, other times I'll load up rig manager, navigate over to the rig exchange, and sort all the rigs by gain. Scroll down to where the gain is the same as the one I liked, lock any stomps or effects I want to keep from the original rig, and just scroll through 40 or 50 amps in the same gain neighborhood, and I usually find something I like.