It's a great post, as would be expected from Melan. As for your dislikes, I see what you mean and they're not unusual complaints, but I often think that what is needed with a hexcrawl is the acknowledgement that it's a fundamentally different scale and mode of play, and then expectations adjusted to match. For example.
With a bit of help like this, I've started to understand what people mean by hex-crawls, but there is still something at the heart of it that rubs me the wrong way. I mean, in our campaign, the vast majority of play has been outdoors travelling from one location to another---mostly on roads, but also through some wilderness. All sorts of crazy stuff happens on the way: some random but most keyed. Lots of locations are only partially fleshed out until the PCs arrival is imminent (like in the next game or 2 or 3).
Sounds kinda hex-y but what I dislike is:
- discrete hex grid movement --- like a video game
True, but recall that it's more accurate to say "like a wargame", and that video games took this from wargaming/RPGs, not the other way around. Additionally, you're looking at something that at its heart is no different than the basic operating mode of the dungeon crawl, with its discrete 10-ft squares on a map and 10-minute highly artificial chunks of time, which are just as vulnerable to a "video-gamey" charge if one is inclined to do so. Myself, I don't think there's any reason to accept one and not the other, or to consider the fact that video gaming later drew on something.
- the horrible hex-coordinate system for marking keyed locations
This one feels a bit arbitrary, and I don't really know why it would be a bother in any case. "Room 7, 5th floor" is fine, but "Hex 097.111" is strange? This is pure aesthetics and you should push past it.
- too much randomness (seems lazy)
Honestly, my dislike is mainly the last bit. Anything with even the mild odor of DM-is-trying-to-avoid-prep smells like poop to me.
It's not trying to avoid prep, it's trying to accurately communicate a higher-level scale (where "level" in this case is referring to the idea that you're "zooming out" more and taking in a larger sweep of things). The larger your canvas, the greater the room there is for variety: variety of encounter types, of terrain, of scale. The advantage to a hexcrawl is that you can conceivably run into a lot more things of a lot greater variety. I see this as a feature, not a bug: New York is different than New Jersey is different than Washington; Nottingham to Manchester to Leeds to York; whatever.
You do need to work to keep things reasonably cohesive. Terrain features should be of a relatively consistent batch, and you should decide the major forces in the area ahead of time so that something doesn't pop up mid-game that would logically throw off your entire ecosystem/setting were it to have always been there (although even that can work: a migrating horde-type feature where a thousand orcs wanders into the area, or something is gated in/awakens from an ancient slumber, are perfectly plausible).
You can already get a remarkable amount of diversity in a dungeon, with its chambers-and-floors discrete construction style. Just consider a hexcrawl the same sort of setup, but with a larger canvas and thus greater tolerance for variance. It's greatly freeing, and yet holds together just fine if you put in some groundwork ahead of time to lay in roads, major landscape features, and define the big factions and base terrain types. I've had whole campaign bits come out of random hex features, and it's been a blast.
What I did for my campaign hexcrawl was pre-construct a massive list of hex features with two subcategories: terrain type and power level. I placed a few that I felt people would know about / would generate rumours ahead of time. The rest I left to be random. Then I simply decided as the party moved into an area if the area was exceptionally dangerous or not (which would be communicated ahead of time with a little research/time spent in the area, unless of course the group struck out to there with no advance prep, in which case it would be on them). And yes, in one hex there might be a magic stream and in the other a tomb of an ancient orc warlord and in another the home of a wolf demigod, and yes they have no connection to one another, but neither I nor my group would expect that. If anything, connecting all of this would come across as very weird: we're talking many miles between them. Connections at such a scale are going to be artificial/the exception: you'd need to justify them, rather than set them as the default. In this regard, the randomness is a feature: you're getting the sense that you're exploring a wide world, with all sorts of strangeness out there. Done right, it feels like a sprawling landscape of adventure, rather than a madhouse.
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