I apologize if I ask the following  obvious questions and perhaps risk wasting everyone's time.  But, I have these nagging questions for a while now:

1).  As I understand it, the 10 minutes delay is to create a new block that there's enough/ sufficient time to fill and confirm the transactions (globally).  But isn't it quite wasteful to keep adjusting the difficulty level to maintain the 10 minutes delay ?  What is so special about the 10 minutes delay?  Has there been any study to quantify more accurately the amount of time to reach the nodes globally ?

2). Let say if we don't have to worry about the trust issue,  in theory we only need one, or perhaps two confirmations right ?  So for the remaining 51% confirmations is essentially to ensure that there's  no cheating could happen.  I got that so far...

3). But what if we could accomplish item#1 and #2 in 5 minutes, 3 minutes or even 30 seconds - shouldn't that be a good thing ?  Why make it more difficult, delay until 10 minutes and empowering expensive equipment ? That seems to feed into the endless cycles of who's got bigger and faster mining capability?  Understand that it seems to justify the rise in bitcoin price...

4). What about making the 51st % node (with the longest chain) to be a lucky lottery winner and avoid increasing the difficulty level and eliminate  the need for fancy equipment and energy burning all together -wouldn't that be more fair and efficient ways to utilize energy and resources ? At the same time avoiding the centralization of miners all together ??

I am guessing that this is too simple and too good to be true - but I have to ask...

Thank you in advance for your reply/ input !