These issues are not difficult to fix. They're either choosing not to, or they don't read any feedback at all and don't even know of our disappointment. Both are equally likely.
Frankly, it's poor software engineering. As one myself, I've been in those design meetings where a particular choice is made ... "what shall we do if this happens?" and a decision is made about what is the most desirable outcome, and that is then built into the logic. But usually someone wil ask "but what if someone wants to make the choice to do the opposite?" and if everyone agrees that it's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, then it'll become a configuration option in a menu somewhere. At this point the UI representative will point out that the menus are getting too complicated and it'll put people off and that's where you make the choice to have advanced menus (see Chrome and Firefox for examples of this). When you go into normal settings you see the simple main menus, but for those of us who want more granularity than that (you're one of them if you're reading this) then there are deeper dive menus.
In the case of a Smartwatch, it's reasonable to keep the advanced menus to being on the smartphone only, and (like on the Tesla) you might be warned of the dangers of going into advanced modes and get a "I want my Mommy" exit route.
All it takes is warning messages like "this could lead to overheating and not be covered by your guarantee" or "this might lead to excessive battery usage" and a quick message ping back to the guarantee servers saying this has happened for this serial number and they're covered. When looking into the battery usage screens they can add a note there "battery usage heavy because YOU chose to do this or that".
I've often programmed in switches in software I've produced that I personally can't imagine why somebody might want to choose it (because I wouldn't want to) and have been later rewarded upon discovering that it was a fairly popular option. It costs little in effort.
It can't be a surprise to Samsung that people will want to keep it properly always-on, or will want to have some control over the gestures (they could have had a 'learn mode' where you make the gesture(s) you want to make to wake it up and put it back to sleep and it remembers them).
They could also offer an option on every screen to only show it a short time, only show it once each time it enters that state, or never ever show it. I'm talking about the "you have no notifications" screen here of course. IT TELLS ME NOTHING USEFUL, STOP SHOWING ME IT.
Personally, I've already had at least 5 people ask me if I'd recommend this smartwatch and I've said no, because of the lack of control you have over all of the above points and worse than that, Samsung are (apparently) not interested in changing any of it.
I'd have given up on this thing if it wasn't for the fact that I make use of the two-factor-authentication abilities of it (for approving computer logins without opening up my phone), and the notifications (but I often have to take on-watch screenshots of notifications, they have a habit of not being retrievable later when you need them but the screenshot is), and the timers and alarms, and the heart bpm and steps is useful too. I certainly don't think that any of the other smartwatches are better though, and that's sad.
