Password protect, yep, forced now, but also was in some version of 7. It is doable, but it's a pain, I don't remember it off hand.
The halfway answer is go to Start, type login, or sign in and click the sign in options button. There is a way right there to disable the password for waking the PC, which makes the password only needed for restarts. That should eliminate at least a portion of that.
Firefox sounds like a Firefox bug. Weird that 8 would affect that, I'll have to look at one of the machines around the office that has Firefox.
I use ctrl-F for find on this page. It's also under the settings gear, file, find on this page. I think the file menu was visible in IE9 and earlier. Alt will also bring up that toolbar.
I can do almost anything faster in 8 than on 7. On items that seem to be buried, just typing and searching for them is much faster than menu digging. But, I've been a big keyboard/hotkey user forever anyhow, so I do most anything faster than people using their mouse for those things.
Solitaire and a few other games are free in the store, but yeah, not taking up space on PCs that don't use them.
They may be slow because they are fancier, not because they are online, they download once you decide to install them.
Maybe a couple of those things will help.