Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.

Yes and no.

The essence of what you're saying is correct, but there's still a "black box" area that we can't measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what's happening before waveform collapse.

This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it's not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don't have.

Example: let's say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite. This is how many of our electronics and measuring devices work today.

Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.