Being able to customize every aspect is very useful. Take the sphere. 20x40 edges is of considerable detail and there's the size parameter. It has 8.28 by default. By using 10, the sphere isn't ten quants, but something otherwise quite random and far bigger than that and it's very confusing to work with. I strongly agree with you.

For your cylinder, it wouldn't be just "radius", but rather "X radius" and "Y radius" as two separate things. With X radius at 32 and Y radius at 24, you get an oval shape. There sphere would use X, Y, and Z radius (and with these used well, you can get a very nice egg shape). For the torus (ring-shape), there are 5 parameters: X radius, Y radius, X diameter, Y diameter, and height. The cone/pyramid should be merged into one thing as they do the exact same thing (of which uses X radius, Y radius, and height). These are based on side parameters, not including the number of edges.