Yeah, I get the frustration. It does seem like everything they want you to contact support. When you do contact support they tried to tell you that CWP & CWPpro don't come with support. You have to pay for support.
And it the forum, we have a bunch of people that are lost and putting their hairs.
I'm looking for a free control panel but if I'm going to pay for support everyday or monthly then I will just pay for cPanel. It is as you said "crazy"!
I am thinking about trying Vesta but I just moved to CWP 3 weeks ago. Also just upgraded to pro. It's so much of a pain to keep on moving as it effect my business.
Anyways, my issue with "Reduce server response time (TTFB)" was cause my Cloudflare. I stop using Cloudflare even though there was an increase in load time. But I think as for SEO, Google seem to care enough about TTFB that they have it on PageSpeed. This is just my opinion. Maybe load time is not as important as TTFB if your load is acceptable. Google cares for user experience. User hate to wait.
Anyways, you sound experienced with servers. I am not. I simply learn as needed for my websites. Have you tried Vesta? I like CWP because it already configured with varnish+ngnix+apache. I can't do it on my own. But I see a lot people voted for Vesta over CWP at lowendtalk by a huge margin.
By the way, I've just updated. File manager working now.