My answers to your questions are in blue:
It's not always easy being a passenger, especially when some of our procedures may be strange to you. But rest assured the flight crew would never intentionally put themselves or you in danger just to complete a flight segment. We have families too!
Hope this helps.
That's the key. Whilst some of these things may be frustrating to passengers, they aren't done frivolously; they are done for safety. Pilots I know have a very high "duty of care" to their passengers.
(Off topic, that duty of care issue was the most shocking aspect of Germanwings' pilot Andreas Lubitz' murder-suicide to many of us who are or have been pilots - genuinely unimaginable to us until it happened.)