> Navigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity.
There are some hidden gems out there. I've been using Locus Map Pro (Android app) for all my cycling and geocaching needs for the last few years, and some of the things you mention do have solutions in it. The app is not at all beginner-friendly, there's like a million various options and functions, but if you're willing to spend time configuring it, usually you can have it do whatever you want.
> I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area
When planning a route, it's possible to choose whether to generate navigation instructions, and this can be chosen for any part of the route separately. It's also possible to delete individual nav instructions or manually add new ones.
> I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map
The route can be saved and then shown/hidden on the map, and there's probably no limit on how many routes can be shown. Color and line width is configurable, too. But yeah, it will be quite a manual process, unfortunately.
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
I think that if the navigation engine is switched to BRouter, it's possible to assign different weights to left/right turns. But I have to admit that tweaking these parameters is too much even for me.
At this point it's also worth mentioning that it only uses OSM routing engines (GraphHopper, BRouter, YOURS), so it can't take traffic into account. Which is fine for my needs (cycling), as I'd rather see the Strava heatmap (and I can!) than live traffic data. :-)
(I'm not affiliated with the project but I do use it a lot and have built an add-on against their API, so I'm a huge fanboy.)
There are some hidden gems out there. I've been using Locus Map Pro (Android app) for all my cycling and geocaching needs for the last few years, and some of the things you mention do have solutions in it. The app is not at all beginner-friendly, there's like a million various options and functions, but if you're willing to spend time configuring it, usually you can have it do whatever you want.
> I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area
When planning a route, it's possible to choose whether to generate navigation instructions, and this can be chosen for any part of the route separately. It's also possible to delete individual nav instructions or manually add new ones.
> I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map
The route can be saved and then shown/hidden on the map, and there's probably no limit on how many routes can be shown. Color and line width is configurable, too. But yeah, it will be quite a manual process, unfortunately.
> There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns
I think that if the navigation engine is switched to BRouter, it's possible to assign different weights to left/right turns. But I have to admit that tweaking these parameters is too much even for me.
At this point it's also worth mentioning that it only uses OSM routing engines (GraphHopper, BRouter, YOURS), so it can't take traffic into account. Which is fine for my needs (cycling), as I'd rather see the Strava heatmap (and I can!) than live traffic data. :-)
(I'm not affiliated with the project but I do use it a lot and have built an add-on against their API, so I'm a huge fanboy.)