Not doubting your experience, but with how I handle initiative with D&D it's very quick. Every player who has gone on to DM after being at my table later adopted this method.
They changed the way recovering from being Shaken works. Originally, when your character was Shaken, you made a Spirit roll to recover but you still couldn't act unless you got a raise on the roll (you rolled 4 over the target number). These days you still get to act once you make your Spirit check to get out of being Shaken. And since you've got that d6 Wild Die in addition to whatever Spirit die you have it's usually not too hard to get out of being Shaken. Though I myself have fallen victim to and seen other people fall victim to the swingy dice and remain Shaken for 2-3 rounds.
That's fair. I think there's a lack of utility spells that probably don't deserve a full blown Power as they're not effective in combat but might provide certain quality of life benefits. Something like D&D's prestidigitation for example.
I think the Savage Pathfinder adaptation will solve some of the utility spell issues.
The rules provided facilitate the game as the designers intended ("it's a feature, not a bug"), but I agree that there is some cruft that could be stripped away--some of the Hindrances and Edges should be revised and the list curated per-campaign--but the vast majority of rules exist to support the game's genre. Although it's marketed as a generic system, it's really "wild west cowboys and Indians" with a coat of paint to make it tenable for multiple genres. I would suggest that the core game could be improved by admitting that the core game is Wild West Cowboys and Indians / Deadlands, writing the rules around that, then revising and tweaking the options in splatbooks for specific settings and genres.
