Thumbs Down for Texting in Canada

I just sent my first Canadian text. I was astonished and frustrated that it took ten minutes to compose a simple text. The following resulted mostly due to:

(1) The toggle key only moving one character at a time through the body of the text.
(2) Only being able to toggle horizontally to select punctuation, rather than having four-way functionality to navigate more quickly through the library.
(3) The inability to mass clear when you are required to start the text over.
(4) The requirement that the telephone number must be entered prior to the composition of the text (as opposed to afterwards, thus my needing to rewrite the whole text because I did not make this assumption beforehand and the text didn't save automatically).
(5) No predictive text!*

* I do believe that on the last point, my UK friends would be very pleased to see that I have finally embraced what is otherwise the bane of my mobile technology existence.