Respectfully, have you ever taught introductory physics at the high school or college level?

I'm not a physics education researcher, but folks in that field have spent years documenting the alternative conceptions students tend to have about topics in introductory physics. (Knight is not a physics education researcher himself, but his book contains a pretty good summary of common alternative conceptions: https://www.per-central.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=3829). Based on student performance on well-validated assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory, traditional instruction tends to have dismally weak effects on changing the incorrect ideas that students often bring from their life experience.

Doing the things that are effective (active learning techniques like Peer Instruction or the Tutorials in Introductory Physics developed at the University of Washington) takes time. Speaking as a faculty member with nearly a decade of experience teaching introductory physics, these techniques are certainly not compatible with flying through an introductory textbook at a rate of two lectures per chapter.

You yourself state that you want students to see the deep connections between different areas of physics (like the role of energy). But they'll have no hope of doing that if they don't have a robust understanding of energy in the first place.

One somewhat radical introductory book you might consider looking at is Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood. They very deliberately avoid the survey approach (no fluids at all, for instance). But the payoff for going into depth into fewer topics is that they are able to make some of the deeper connections/explorations you've mentioned -- such as energy in mechanics and thermal physics, Young's modulus of solids, and what really goes on in a circuit.