You can still get a cursor by holding down space bar.

that deserves a whole separate opera. why does moving the cursor to start/end almost always place it one character off? same when trying to use touch on text for it.

Space bar which is at... the bottom of the screen, so if you want to move the caret down... 3D Touch worked _anywhere_, also had no delay, and hard press a second time was much more convenient for selection.