My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
What exactly do you mean by that? "never far" as in "always within walking distance"? That would be very wrong.
The other factor is that frequency of service is low outside of major cities. At the need to change and a small-distance trip can take a couple of hours.
Intercity travel has lots of punctuality problems but many of the local train operations and S-Bahn are often much superior. At least in places where I have been, like Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg the local transport has been very good.
Not everything in live is about long distance communing.
> 3h down to the 1h
That completely depends on the details of your route and ignores lots of possible aspects. As a universal statement its just outright false.
I've had similar experiences commuting into Cologne where it's 40 minutes by car or 2 hours by train, and that's without delays. In the rush hours it's 60 minutes by car. A missed train connection adds another half hour.