With regards to my GDS2202E not having vertical/horizontal fine controls, I have been having a little play and found for large excursions of vertical the response speeds up, and for small excursions it slows right down which is the same as having fine/coarse controls except it's automatic on the GDS2202E scope.
That's not what Hydra was referring to. Vernier controls are not for managing the rate of change (which you described), but rather setting the scale to intermediate values beyond the fixed 1/2/5 settings. So, e.g. if you wanted to set the vertical to 185 mV/div, that would be possible on most other scopes, but not on the GDS2000E series. You're locked into 50/100/200/500 mV/div, etc.
And anticipating your reply...
Just because you may never have used such a capability, and others may not use it often, does not mean it is not a valuable and useful capability to have. It is unfortunate that Instek failed to incorporate it, since the scope is so good in many other ways, and it is not difficult to implement.