What I mean is, English’s spelling, pronunciation, and grammar rules seem to Me to be highly optional in comparison with other languages I know a few things about. It’s a less consistent language.

English having "highly optional" pronunciation and grammar rules is not considered to be true by linguists, so you'll have to give me an example of what you mean. All languages have exceptions and idiosyncracies, and none are considered to be more or less "consistent" (whatever that means) than any other. They may have very different systems, but all of those systems are considered to contain about the same amount of total complexity.

English has tons of words that you’ll mispronounce if you only read them, because they don’t follow the majority convention. See: epitome, and all the many words that have the “ough” substring and use it to mean different sounds.

This is a common misconception among people learning to look at language through the eyes of a linguist that always takes a while to fully wrap their heads around: writing is not language.

Writing is just a conventional way of encoding language, nothing more. Writing systems and spelling rules are historical accidents, and linguists ignore them completely when doing linguistic work. All we're concerned with is grammar, the unconscious system of rules that govern a native speaker's spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) output, and paying attention to orthography (writing) only makes that internal system harder to access. This is why linguists created the International Phonetic Alphabet to write the sounds of all languages in a (mostly) consistent manner, completely ignoring writing conventions.

The most straightforward way to show that spoken language and writing are completely separate and almost unrelated systems is the following: all human children acquire a native language automatically and seemingly without effort if they're exposed to it as an infant, but writing systems and spelling conventions must be explicitly taught once they're older.

"Acquisition" vs. "learning" is the difference between learning to walk and learning to build a birdhouse. When children reach the appropriate developmental stage, they will learn to walk, automatically, whether their parents help them or not. And, once they've learned to do so, they cannot explain how they do it to anyone else - they just do. Language is the same way - it's an innately programmed unconscious behavior, an "instinct" as Steven Pinker famously put it.

Building a birdhouse, on the other hand, is not something that happens automatically - it's a process that must be explicitly taught by someone else, and once the person has learned to do so they can also explain the process to others.

So, for these reasons I have to disagree that English is any "better at loanwords" than any other language. Linguistically speaking (that is, completely ignoring writing systems), English could maybe be considered "better" at some aspects of loanwords (its less complex morphology allows for adaptation without adding any new "word-pieces" - see Spanish having to fit borrowed verbs into its -ar-conjugation class, for example), but it's much worse at other aspects. For example, English's less common vowel phonology often makes loanwords sound very different than they do in their original language - we need go no further than Japanese, where straightforward ka-ra-o-ke becomes in English the monstrosity "kerree-owkee".

I'm not a sociolinguist, so I don't feel comfortable speaking authoritatively on gendered language discourse, but what I would suggest is that if English is better at adapting for queer people, that's much more likely to be due to the culture of the speakers than due to the architecture of the grammar, in my opinion.

Finally, if any of this has been interesting to you and you'd like to learn more about looking at language from a linguist's perspective, I highly recommend Steven Pinker's very readable bestseller "The Language Instinct" as a starting point.