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It's just the random AI being random. Factions are never truly short on anything, a random request is simply spawned when the quest is. In the case of common requests, it can lead to weirdness like this.

It's also worth nothing that already trained animals will follow tamers if toggled to do so in the animals menu (it's considered "dangerous work").

Use walls to force the lancers into a smaller area where they can't outrange your turrets. Do everything you can to give them other targets than your pawns (turrets or expendable animals).

I'm not sure if this is the answer you're looking for, but prices are determined by the pawn speaking to the trader. That pawn uses their social skill to haggle, and the price displayed is whatever agreement they reach (the AI crunches some numbers) about the value of things.

Switch to manual job priority, change doctor to 1 and set everything else to no higher than 2. This will make your pawn prioritize doctoring jobs over everything else. If it's still not working, right-click the pawn and force the job.

I think you and I have very different definitions of the word exploit. Just because there are no rules to break, doesn't mean that any strategy is "legitimate". For instance, breaking items on purpose to reduce wealth value is not something anyone would do for any reason except to adjust some numbers. It's spreadsheet strategy. You act purely to adjust the value of an item, without touching any other aspect of the game. Changing the item's value in the game files would be the exact same action in my eyes - you're just taking the long way around.
Call it a loophole instead of a exploit if you want, but it's definitely not strategy.

Part of being a good player is identifying useless skills and keeping them low to avoid unnecessary pawn wealth.

That's absurd. The game doesn't feature useless skills presented to the player as a trap they're supposed to learn to avoid. Perhaps the social skill is unbalanced or needs adjustment, but claiming it only exists to confuse and obstruct players makes no sense.

I tend to start out a new colony with reasonably high expectations for moral behavior and then slowly descend into a more grey area as circumstances force me to make hard choices. Once you learn how to read the impact various actions have on your pawns and their behavior, it quickly becomes clear what sort of behavior is tolerated and what isn't. It's not difficult to run a colony that's ruthlessly efficient but also happy, because you only need to avoid specific types of "bad" behavior and they're all pretty obvious. Don't eat or butcher humans, don't abuse/kill prisoners and don't harm your own pawns or tamed animals on purpose. That's pretty much it. Everything else is just a matter of base layout, resource management and a bit of luck.

I recommed the mass graves mod, though I'm not sure it's been updated for b19. Has the added benefit of adding that real-life genocide feel to your colony.

Pawn AI priorities goes something like this: Seek comfortable temperature -> eat if hungry -> rest if tired ->  whatever their schedule allows. Pawns will always ignore any schedule you set up for them in order to fulfill basic needs if their bars drop too low. I'm not sure if this includes recreation.

It's a pretty bad trait, and it doesn't even make sense... you don't need to eat more because you have refined taste.

A much more sensible take on the trait would be double bonus or penaly from meals - gourmands would really hate eating nutrient paste, but they'll go through hell and back for you as long as there's a lavish meal waiting for them at the end of the day. Maybe even add -5 for eating simple meals, because it's too bland for them. This means a bigger demand on the player to have varied resources, but doesn't drain any extra resources by default.

Pawns don't blindly follow orders when doing jobs - this is nothing new. The problem is that being both a doctor a patient are considered jobs, and pawns prioritize their needs over their jobs. This is why patients get out of bed to play horseshoes at bad times, and why doctors go to bed instead of treating serious wounds. You have to manually force your pawns to preserve their own lives, which makes the AI appear dumb.
Until we have some sort of tool to affect that decision-making process, you're stuck micro-managing every major medical emergency, because it requires fast and co-ordinated effort that the AI is simply not capable of in my opinion.

I do like the changes to disease/infection treatment - it makes the whole thing much less fiddly as long as you have enough medicine.

Nutrient dispensers are a better solution, since they eliminate food poisoning. Just make enough hoppers and don't set them to auto-fill or your haulers will waste tons of time carrying one potato back and forth all day.

I think it's pretty simple to increase the range of a pawn's "search for table" check. That way, they should look for tables from further away than normal.

You could just wall off your animals while it lasts and let them back out when they stop being crazy.