Interesting. Despite my efforts to consider that people have different preferences for almost everything in life, I am constantly surprised by my assumumptions about how other people do things that turn out to be very wrong.
It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wrong" with them is that _I_ can't figure out how to click things on the first (or 5th) try.
My main problems with touch pads in general is that they are not smooth enough (meaning that rubbing your fingers in them for a few hours gets unpleasant), they have clicky buttons that need to much force to activate (which strains the finger you use most to click), they are too small so things like drag and drop often require intermediate steps, they are not sensitive enough (so you often need to repeat gestures, particularly 2-finger scroll; tapping almost never works the first time).
Apple’s touch pads (at least the recent ones) have none of these problems and are as smooth, responsive and reliable as good smartphones. They are actually useable as a main input device, not only in a pinch.
You are not alone. I don't even consider buying any laptop other than a ThinkPad due to the lack of TrackPoint and being forced to use a touchpad if I don't have a mouse for some reason. I always make a mess with touchpads, including Mac and non-Mac ones.
(Not your comment's parent) Apple making touchpads bigger is why I stick to their 13" 2015 MacBook air! When I got a recent Pro for work, it was nearly unusable from the oversized, oversensitive trackpad. Yes, even after setting all the options that (I was assured) would make it stop picking up unintended presses. When typing, I'd unavoidably brush the trackpad and cause the cursor to move somewhere and click, redirecting my input.
Like your comment's parent, I used the trackpad because I prefer doing everything from the keyboard and so prefer the trackpaid for things that require a mouse-like interface.
Not saying I can make this better for your use case, but I'm curious if you use tap to click? i.e. click with a simple touch. I love the big track pads and also hate the tap to click setting (I want to press to click) and don't have this problem.
Modern touchpads are significantly improved compared to the old generations (even from 5 years ago). It's not that touchpads are bad input devices (like they used to be), it's that I'm bad at touchpads.
I could probably get used to them if I had any reason to, but I have no idea where I would even put my laptop to use it comfortably with an external monitor. I like my mouse and I have no problems with it, so no sense in buying an external touchpad.
If I did a lot of work like scrubbing through audio/video or something that benefited from multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom, then maybe I'd consider it.
But even on a phone/tablet selecting text is a massive pain. Selecting stuff, dragging stuff, quickly flicking the cursor from one screen to the next: those are all things I assume every developer does at least a couple of times an hour. They are also things that, for me, are very clumsy when using a trackpad.
It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wrong" with them is that _I_ can't figure out how to click things on the first (or 5th) try.