OP, I feel you for the most of what you're saying. The first month or two, I also had a rough time shifting smoothly and would often stall to my own surprise, leading to an overall initial dissatisfaction with driving this car. This is coming from almost 10 years of driving different manual cars beforehand. You will get used to it in due time though. Hell, I'm still not perfect driving mine and it's been over a year but it's 90% smooth. For a sports car, I'm really not sure how the engineers signed off on this when all Subaru ever emphasize for this car was the FEEL/CONNECTION of driving it.
There are three ways to improve clutch feel that will help improve driving smoothness:
- Clutch slave replacement as mentioned above
- Removing the assist spring above the clutch pedal
- Replacing the assist spring with a less springy one.
<--- this video gives a good explanation and idea
For heel-toe downshift, no thanks to the DBW and sorta odd height difference between the pedals, I've learned that you really have to STAB the throttle in (precision and finesse be damned) to have a better chance of getting a proper revmatch. Intuitively, It feels like too much (because it IS if the throttle was cabled) but more often than not, it lands the rev perfectly in the lower gear. Works best above 3K RPM.
It's too bad this car isn't like the Miata, where you can hop in and your body muscles just "gets it" with the controls within the first drive. But like I said, you'll enjoy it more in due time.