As soon as you stand still, you'll find yourself in thick cloud of the bastards within 20 seconds. If you use repellent (picaridine does work to keep them from stining but isn't exactly healthy), they will still buzz around you and slowly drive you mad. If you use netting, some get through the inevitable gaps and some will obviously get inside your tent/car/house when you open them.
The sound of thousands of them flying around you just triggers some primal revulsion. Around sundown, their activity gets so intense that it literally sounds like a drone, if they're a large variety it even sounds a bit like a distant hornet swarm.
All in all, I don't think we can become friends. But at least they're more pleasant than black flies and deer flies.
I wonder if the unintended consequences would be tame enough to justify using a gene drive to breed human predation out of mosquitos.
Sure, they're annoying, but I don't actually care about them sucking my blood that much. I have plenty of the stuff, they only take a tiny amount, and they feed birds and bats with it.
Having to spend hours afterward physically uncomfortable certainly tempers my magnanimity.
Not useful for meaningful control in the kind of swarm situation you describe, but cathartic! And useful for the stragglers who sneak into your shelter behind you…
i'd rather not have them suck my blood even if there is no disease risk
This is impossible.
One night in the northwoods of Minnesota will quickly and completely disabuse you of this fantastical notion. I would make all mosquitoes extinct at great personal cost, if there was a way to do it. Being disease vectors doesn't even have much to do with it. They are the most profoundly irritating bug, with zero redeeming qualities. They make large swathes of country difficult to exist in during dawn and dusk. I cannot express in words the depths of my hate for mosquitoes.