I actually think your point #2 must have been fixed recently. I was playing last night and I seemed to be able to shift click to a relic and then back. Not sure if it was quietly patched because it was definitely an issue before.
I also 100% agree on the quickmenu (link to your post here: Quickmenu (Controller) need to be optimized ). There doesn’t seem to be much consistency from civ to civ. On some civ’s it gets totally overcrowded with tech’s, which I agree should be their own separate ‘tab’ i.e. right on D pad or something. Then the other night I was playing as House of Lancaster and the quick menu looks like this:
Where you have separate ‘tabs’ for military, siege etc. The problem with this approach of separating them out into separate buttons is it starts to resemble the ‘buliding’ quick menu where you can just select specific buildings. I think it’s LT → right on D pad and you can see archery ranges, barracks etc. However, some civ’s the LT → right on D pad (building quickmenu) doesn’t work. Byzantines is a good example of this. The mercenary house doesn’t show up at all when you do LT → D pad right. So you cannot reach Longbowman production for example this way, you have to use the military quickmenu.
The challenge here is speed. How do you minimize the number of buttons sequences that a player has to press before reaching the desired unit or tech. To this end I almost always prefer the military quickmenu because it only takes one button to be able to produce the units I need.