Stat growth does work correctly, and you can see in the jobs menu which stat is measured for job efficiency ... this is also the one that grows over time. I have noticed however that some jobs seem to grow slower than others. Dancing, for instance, seems to grow slower than gathering wood ... and that's before you consider the factors, which can slow progression to a crawl.
Social skills can be cancelled by right-clicking. Many menus can be closed the same way. However, I find that it often takes multiple clicks to cancel a skill, and menus have to be clicked in specific areas to close them (generally in areas where there are no buttons, but sometimes right over the buttons, with no rhyme or reason).
Service jobs give money relative to the related skills (they specify which one for each job if it's not sexuals) as well as the slave's overall value. Early profits are low precisely because it takes time to train your servants. They need their skills, classes, AND various training perks from the Training and Rules menu to gain the value to make a profit. This is fairly common for an RPG-like game, but it does get pretty extreme here. But if you were to spend the time and effort training one slave at a time, and give them added value as fast as it becomes available, they would start making money quite quickly. I haven't managed any no-combat runs yet but low-combat runs really can stay ahead of the debt payment.
I agree that a combat-heavy start is heavily favored here but for a different reason: slave factor upgrades. In previous versions, slaves' factors could be upgraded directly with gold or xp, but now you have to find a slave with the factor you want and sacrifice them to feed that factor into another slave (which costs gold based on the value of the recipient). Factors lead to faster growth of physics/etc, which improves profitability, and no factor is more valuable than growth, which has an exponential effect on the slave's value, as well as determining the job efficiency multiplier (and as I mentioned, value is huge in determining their profits from services). Just to put some raw numbers up here, my current game has a newly-acquired cat stripper who has only 2 growth and the dancer and harlot classes, has no advanced training, is worth 310, and earns 64 gold per day. My fully-loaded Daisy, on the other hand, has 6 growth (trained her to 5 before buying the dress, which gives +1), every class in the sex section, and every value-adding training option, is worth 6683, and can make 948 per day as a sex toy, or 896 per day as a stripper (fun fact, stripper runs off charm, which for her is at 60/100, so she isn't making max profits there yet). Of course this extreme gap means you'd be heavily penalized for not upgrading your slaves, and you need to sift through a lot of slaves to find enough sacrifices for just one to be fully upgraded. Without the huge influx of free characters from combat, such upgrades would be completely impractical. You simply can't find that many slaves in the markets, and it would be far too expensive if you could.
I disagree that crafting jobs get "the shortest end of the stick" as I've found crafted weapons and armor essential to all my combat characters, and crafted tools vital to all my workers. Workers' outfits and other costume attire I can usually find plenty of without the bother of making it myself, but armor, weapons, and tools found in shops or taken from the stores never seem to be built the way I want them. I do very much wish, however, that you didn't need a level 2 tailor to make medium armor. The early game is laced with an obnoxious period where you can make heavy armor but can't equip it to anybody, but you can't make the medium armor you can actually use.
I don't have much to say on your other points except that I agree with them. Some excellent QoL suggestions.