The first issue is confusing to me. I also recently switched to Mac and I find Finder to be super intuitive and easy to use. Icons view is very easy to find, there is literally only 9 buttons in Finder, where 4 of them represent different views... As regards to making icons larger I agree that finding the actual setting is complicated, but I intuitively tried cmd+plus(+) and it worked.

btw for looking through photos I find gallery view to be more convenient.