I understand you’re seeking a more capable scroll solution and better placement of UI elements you describe. Guess you need to go app shopping. Shuttle2 has scroll behaviour similar to Spotifys. But there’s no f-droid release yet.
For my own usage, I missed search the most when it got removed from the default app in 2021 and created an issue with some links - Music app: missing search function - #2 by tcecyk