Ko variations and scoring rules are kind of inelegant in Go as well. Having to determine life and death under certain scoring systems can be painful for beginners.
I agree slightly about Ko (although it does not seem that inelegant to say that you cannot repeat a board position). However, this scoring complications are entirely a result of players being lazy, the game would be equivalent if you played until the person whose turn it is had no legal moves.
This ruleset would be prohibitivly tedious, but (in Japanese scoring) if you play with the rule that passing requires you to give your opponent an extra captured stone, then the game become equivalent to one where players were required to capture all the stones they thought were dead.
This is even simpler under Chinese scoring, where you would not even have to give your opponent pass stones.
However, because players are lazy, their is no reason to waste time killing dead stones.
Having said that, I can think of 2 inelegences that you did not mention:
Komi, where we give White extra points just because Black was winning to often.
This ruleset would be prohibitivly tedious, but (in Japanese scoring) if you play with the rule that passing requires you to give your opponent an extra captured stone, then the game become equivalent to one where players were required to capture all the stones they thought were dead.
This is even simpler under Chinese scoring, where you would not even have to give your opponent pass stones.
However, because players are lazy, their is no reason to waste time killing dead stones.
Having said that, I can think of 2 inelegences that you did not mention:
Komi, where we give White extra points just because Black was winning to often.
The overtime rules in timed games.