Is there essentially no way to have a flat schematic without ‘hacking’ the first page to contain all the sheets and then creating global net labels/ports?
Correct, KiCad doesn’t do flat schematics.
Man what a drag…
Does KiCAD have a feature voting system? I’d love to see this get integrated. It’s a bit unusual that they don’t.
If you can find a wishlist item in the bug tracker you could voice your support for it, but for something changing the way schematics work in general a simple vote isn’t enough, you’d have to convince the lead developers that it’s genuinely a good idea - and most are not going to agree.
Try actually using the hierarchical system, it makes for much more readable schematics when done properly. Draw your top sheet as a block diagram of your system, with hierarchical connections linking things together, using globals only for power nets. I promise it works well 
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So in a now related topic…
Can you copy sections of one page to another?
Yup, block-select and then press Ctrl+C, then click Paste on the toolbar in the other page. (No idea why Ctrl+V was never implemented, that seems a bit silly).
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Of course by block commands. But using hierarchy of sheets you could also place two or more instances of one hierarchical sub-sheet.
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And now Ctrl-V works!!