The frustration you mentioned with mouse wheels is not a problem of "wheels" per se. We are gonna run into exactly the same experience if a "knob" alternative has the same low-resolution encoders.
Wheels and knobs are both rotary controls and share most of the same benefits of easy acceleration/deceleration and fine adjustments.
Advantages of wheels are: 1) concealment, most wheel controls only expose a small portion of their perimeters to engage finger tips; 2) needing only 1 finger to control;
The advantage of knobs is the slightly finer control offered by the coordination among more than 1 finger. It's basically the same kind of difference between calligraphy with pen attached to one finger vs. pen controlled by three fingers plus a bit of help from the wrist.
None of my synth tweaking require calligraphy-level finesse. The current problems with mouse wheels, are low resolution and inconsistent response curve across apps, as we both noted.
If you are geeky enough, there's a PC software called ScrollNavigator that tries to address the response/acceleration curve problem. I find it helpful in scrolling through long web pages/documents. But garbage in garbage out, there's only so much magic we can squeeze out of the roughly 7 clicks/pulses generated by a full mouse wheel push/pull.
What we need, well, what I need, as I mentioned above, are 1) higher resolution on the mouse wheel encoder, 2) consistent or adjustable acceleration response curves across apps. These two simple improvements would greatly increase productivity across tons of areas.
BTW, you can Shift+Scroll for increments of 10 on most Roland soft synths. That should really become industry standard.