Usually just skim the comments to gather insight as quickly as possible, if there seems to be a strong signal with depth, I'll add the HN page to Pocket (https://getpocket.com) and check back later when I clear through all the backlog of interesting things
HN has replaced Reddit for me. I'm still reading Slashdot, two decades later, it usually just dupes HN.
Also Lobsters (https://lobste.rs) has some decent content, similar position in that it often dupes HN, but interesting regardless
regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing