Hi James,
I think you’ll find yourself surrounded here by a bunch of people with enormous amounts of experience in various fields. There’s also a huge amount of creativity here. And sometimes those two Venn diagrams overlap 
(There’s also a third somewhat overlapping group of crazy people and trolls…but it’s an internet forum, what can one expect?) And people who are new to all of this.
Myself, I’ve got a ton of real-world experience in software and jack of all trades experience in other areas. I’ve never used a laser cutter before and just got my 
last night (and have my own Community Support ticket open because it won’t load any prints 
)
But when I approach a new technology, or even a new instance of a technology I’ve used before, I try to take the stance of a newbie, and not assume that everything will work the way I expect.
This is one of the quintessential attitudes that I think will serve you (and anyone) well when working with new things. Everything has quirks. There are so many ways of accomplishing things that no matter how someone designs something, there will be people who wonder why it wasn’t done in some other (perfectly obvious) way.
And that’s why the Glowforge community is so important to coming up to speed on how to use this laser. I agree that the software is still very much in a Beta stage, and I think you are correct that it needs some User Experience (UX) revisions. I think Glowforge thinks this too considering the demo reel that was presented at Adobe MAX, where a UX consultancy was talking about using Adobe XD to help design a mobile experience for Glowforge:
As for the scaling issue, if you do a search here in the forum for “svg scale” it will come up with several conversations that have to do with this. The TL;DR of them is that an SVG needs some container (either in or out of the SVG file itself) to define the reference size. Remember that the S in SVG stands for Scaleable.
Some very experienced users have asked if you can upload the wing rib SVG so that they can help identify why it might be printing the wrong size. I totally understand the desire to figure it all out without any help, but sometimes someone else looking at it can lead to the same learning, but without going down quite so many blind alleys (and without wasting as much material )
I look forward to seeing what you are able to do with your !