I can't say I have any of these issues. Whenever I want to be in control of the gears and use the engine as I would in a manual gearbox (which is 90% of the time) I switch the DSG to Manual regardless of drive mode and it does exactly what I want it to: keep a gear longer, engine-brake, drop 2 or 3 gears at once (actually you just flick the left paddle as many times as you want and it downshifts I don't understand how you have problems there). The only time I switch it to D is when I am tired and just want to slowly drive back home and don't want to bother with the traffic at all. For everything else, the manual mode does it better. I find S pretty useless as it usually revs the **** out of it while never even being in the right revs for the road conditions (and how could it be really...)
Imho, the DSG in Manual mode offers the best of both worlds. As good a control of the engine, power delivery and gears with none of the inherent weaknesses of a manual transmission like upsetting the dynamics during clutch engaging/disengaging and worse control due to mostly one hand on the wheel (especially when driving fast), and significantly longer time to change through gears.
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