4) Please pass it to who I'm aiming to, not the guy 30 yards across the pitch.

This was added in FIFA 11 to avoid "ping-passing", if you played any FIFA games online, before FIFA 11, you would have noticed how if you keep hitting the pass button the ball would have almost always find another player on your team and this was pretty crappy and this would be a disadvantage to others especially if you were playing as Barcelona.

Don't change your passing settings, just play on default, it took me at least a month to get used to it but you get that "excitement".