Why is mounting a USB disk in a usable manner so difficult?

[J]

TSIA.

I have a brand new 2TB USB3 external HDD.  It came from the factory
formatted in NTFS, naturally.

I also have a system running Saucy.

I plug my brand new 2TB NTFS formatted external USB3 HDD into my
system running Saucy and the drive is mounted to my user mount dir
with 0700 permissions:

drwx------ 1 bladernr bladernr 4096 Dec 16 12:47 Alexandria

and anything created inside that drive is given 0600 permissions:
-rw------- 1 bladernr bladernr 179 Dec 16 12:47 update-library

and it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to create an executable script on that
disk.  Utterly impossible.  Even after trying to remount with the
right fmask, umask and dmask.  Even after trying to remount with exec
set.

So I gave up on NTFS and formatted the drive in ext4.  After
re-formatting in ext4, I plugged the 2TB external USB3 HDD into my
Saucy machine.

NOW, Saucy chooses to mount the drive in my users mount point,
/media/username/drivename
WITH ROOT ownership.
/dev/sdb1 on /media/bladernr/Alexandria type ext4
(rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks2)

bladernr at klaatu:/media/bladernr$ ll
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 16 13:21 Alexandria

Which makes it impossible toe ven create files on my USB HDD now.

so two questions:

How the heck do I fix this so that my external hard drives are mounted
in a way that I can actually use them?

Why do we make it so bloody difficult to actually plug a drive in and use it?

Cheers,

Jeff