I'll take a shot at trying to answer some of your questions: 1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using pa

I'll take a shot at trying to answer some of your questions: 1. I originally thought the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle was a natural consequence of using particles (photos) for measurement. That's the observer effect. When quantum mechanics was first constructed, it was believed that the uncertainty principle could be explained that way. As you mentioned, today, it is considered a more fundamental feature of the theory. As an analogy, consider how a signal sharply located in the time domain gets smeared out in the frequency domain, and vice versa. It's kind of like that. 2. What does it even mean to create more space? The universe is expanding. Ok, I can accept that. But what does it mean? Specific volume (the average volume occupied by a unit of mass) increases. If the universe was spatially finite, so would total volume. 3. I find the models for dark matter and dark energy to be... unsatisfying. I realize there's experimental evidence for unobservable mass but it feels like a fudge. Shrugs. If dark matter turns out to in fact be just a bunch of yet to discovered particles, that wouldn't be too strange. Dark energy is more of an unknown. 4. Of course we still have no quantum model for gravity. That's an issue. 5. I don't really understand what a fundamental force really is. Like why does electromagnetism have a repulsive opposite but gravity doesn't? When I tried to look into this I ended up down some rabbit hole of "gauge forces" and got completely lost. For now, there's a certain amount of arbitrariness involved: We could easily construct universes that worked differently. Furthermore, gravity is special: At the classical level, it's not a regular force, but a pseudo-force (a consequence of Newton's first law). Also note that it can in fact manifest repulsively (eg via the cosmological constant). From the perspective of particle physics, it's also special because the hypothesized force carrier (the graviton) would have spin 2 instead of 1. Why is the Higgs Field not a force? To my knowledge, there should be an effect one could call Higgs force. It would be tiny. 6. Why are some predictions of the Standard Model so incredibly accurate (like the magnetic moment of an electron IIRC?) while others are so incredibly inaccurate (eg IIRC the QFT prediction of vacuum energy is off by 120 orders of magnitude). Quantum Electrodynamics can be solved perturbatively. We know how to do that. Things that can't be handled that way tend to be hard. Regarding vacuum energy, you'd have to account for every fundamental field there is to get it right, so no surprise we get it wrong. Also, given that we have no quantum theory of gravity, it's not even clear to me that it is even the right approach. 7. Why are there exactly three generations of particles (ignoring the Higgs)? Figure that out, get a Nobel prize. It could even be arbitrary, like how it's futile to ask why a particular snowflake looks different than another snowflake created in similar conditions: Random chance. Hope that helps a bit.