I agree with you that instacing in Blender is super cumbersome. I always have a top level collection of collections that will get a collection instance at some point. I build those at 0,0,0 to avoid collection instance offsets when the source collection moves. That’s dog**** compared to C4D. But it’s muscle memory by now and all of my scenes have it, so it’s actually quick to migrate those objects between scenes…
I would love a Blender instancing system that can take an object, group or collection as input…
Just add an empty to your collection (you don’t have to parent anything to it) to mark the position you want the instance origin to be. If you choose to move the asset away from [0,0,0] you can use the empty to update the instances with the new origin point.
At one point in the Asset Browser dev discussion someone suggested a workaround to the problem of Linked Objects not being able to be moved without first doing a library override of the Object level transforms. They proposed being able to instance an object the same as instancing a collection which is what happens when you link a collection asset.
Geometry nodes allows you to instance an object or group or collection but it’s cumbersome, especially if you are instancing on points and you want some of the instances to have a different rotation or scale set manually.