This is slightly embarrassing since I"m a longtime user who makes a living with Cubase and I never deeply checked out the Logical Editor Presets for some ridiculous reason until recently (thanks to Steve here turning me on to what it can really do).
For those who don’t use it already, please check it out – it makes many things way faster in Cubase, especially when using something like Metagrid when you don’t want to remember tons more key commands. And you can program it to do things you might be complaining about. 
There’s still a lot of work to be done by Steinberg with workflow/mouse-and-button-click-flow in general, but this is something that can at least help in some ways along the way, and it’s been there forever.
The more you know…