Completely agree - the quality of peer-review is a lottery. Sometimes you get an excellent referee making good points, other times you get a referee solely focussed on making sure you cite their work. And, occasionally, you get a referee who doesn't even appear to read the paper and just waves it through.
Agreed. Peer-review is essential. I do like the idea of a public peer review however, similar to that in the https://joss.theoj.org/ - I had a really pleasant experience reviewing a paper for JOSS.
I think sometimes reviewers hide behind their anonymity to give snarky responses, and using their power over you, knowing you will try your very best to implement all of their suggestions in order to publish faster. I just think the whole process should be more transparent.
I do a similar thing, but the papers I'm interested in are usually a bit too niche for a general audience. That's one of the things I don't like about academic papers, particularly in my field (astro), we don't tailor our abstracts and introductions to a wider audience.
You can use things like arxivsorter and benty-fields for this. You give them a list of papers you've published, or authors you are interested in and then get recommendations. The recommendations can be up and down voted to improve future recommendations.