All mouse related usability quirks I noticed went away as soon as I changed the mouse settings to "always" use "game mode".  The mouse pointer became as sensitive as on the host and scrolling in the guest works perfectly.  I am on workstation pro 15 centos 8 host with ubuntu 18 guest.

My other problem - exclusive mode doesn't capture some keys - also seems to be related to centos 8 using wayland by default.  Logging in using xorg instead fixed that problem.

Now vmware workstation pro 15 works perfectly for me and is way better in every respect I can think of (guest performance, virtualization usability) than KVM or virtualbox.