Questions about hydraulic valves and pumps

I'm setting up a couple of hydraulic rc equipment and I've noticed that the valves don't seem to have fine control and the pumps don't have a bypass when they're unused.

I put together a skid steer loader as a kit, to better learn and understand how they work. This one has an electric drivetrain, but 3 channels of hydraulic control for the arm, bucket and accessory. I've hooked it up to a bench power supply for testing and can see that when the pump is running, but not being used it draws a fair number of amps.

To "solve" this, in the radio I've set things up so that at ~ neutral, the pump stops. I've also configured the pump to a knob, so I can dial in the strength. But there just doesn't seem to be much range between closed and open on the valves. Is that just how it is across the board? I've only ever briefly driven a farm tractor w/ a loader on the front, but it had much finer control. Another minor complaint on this model is that the ESCs must have been intended for a car, because it still has a pointless brake (meaning you have to go "backward" twice) and reverse is slower than forward making pirouettes not as nice. They don't even have stickers, so I can't look up a manual in hopes of changing their programming.

I also have a more complicated excavator that seems to behave similarly. The pumps don't seem to have a bypass and the valves don't have much gradual between closed and open. It has a broken cabin joint part, so I haven't been able to test it as much for fear of breaking the cabin.

One hope I had was to scale the pump w/ stick deflection, but that has proven hard to do on both edgetx and ethos.