Tammi,
What you're saying is true. I'm not arguing, honest. Besides sewing slow most of time, I use an adapter I call a widget.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]471459[/ATTACH]
It uses a 1/2" diameter piece of dowel rod with a flat base for the spools with the larger holes to sit on. I made them for the C&C spools with the large hole cardboard spool and the little short cone shaped plastic spools too.
These allow the cross wound spools of thread to rotate easily. They don't bind that way. At least not for us.
My wife does not sew slow. She doesn't know how. Pedal to the metal for her. Using the adapter widget she doesn't have any trouble with the cross wound spools either.
We have one Singer, a 4622a that has the horizontal spool pin and we actually have more trouble with the cross wound spools on that machine with the horizontal pin than we do with the vertical machines using the widget. I've actually used the plastic auxiliary vertical spool pin on the 4622a with a widget instead of the horizontal pin and it's worked better.
Both for both me (slow), and my wife (fast), with our different techniques.
I don't know why as I said, but we just don't seem to have any trouble with them when set vertically.
I had some pic of the widgets from the past, but I can't find them.
Joe