I come from a family of lawyers so what you're describing as being control freak? Just perfectly normal and reasonable. It's
procedure.
Now it becomes debilitating when procedure gets into disproportion or becomes a pretext to be avoidant of something else. Personally, being attentive to the fine print really did help me to understand and navigate administration, for myself and also against abusers. Landlord wants to chuck you out because they don't like you? Bro, here are my rights, here's the tenancy agreement, clause thingie is illicit, f*ck you and thank you very much.
It's not so much that contracts are something that are
made to f*ck you over, a contract is the last resort that will be used when something
doesn't go as you wish or there is a conflict. Of course there are things as
contrats léonins (lion's contracts) where the contractor has leverage on the contractant and basically even if you don't like it, you have to sign it because you're in need or can't refuse for whatever reason that isn't explicit in the contract. This also normally is forbidden by law but here you go with lawyers and long trials and sometimes it's better to cut your losses. Some actors do know that and they know most people cannot afford the effort to correct injustices of the sort.
Lawyers will often recommend you to let go of something or find an arrangement instead of trying to get to justice. Because then you'll have all the machine of procedure and the magic of language and interpretation, jurisprudence, knowing the judges and eventually prosecutors well and yada yada. I do agree with
@whiteraven that reading consent forms should be something that is more pushed by the bodies that require your consent. Sometimes, taking a service
in itself is consenting; but it's required by law that you have access to the knowledge of what you're consenting to. So if you want to piss everyone and take your time for your fine print, it's their problem.
As much as contracts can act as not being in favour to you, they're also something that can protect you in many cases. It's not just one direction.
Now what you might want to find out is how to know if something is worth all the worry and attention or not. Reading a tenancy agreement in detail? Something that requires your engagement for a while? Certainly worth reading.
And, you know, the quantity of people I've seen arriving at the lawyer because they got married without thinking that one day they'll might divorce and hate each other to their guts, it's just infinite. And then justice and ambiguity in contracts become instruments of something worse than just the divorce. Not only with divorces but if families weren't tired to have disagreements the profession would be dead since a long time. So, for the week or month or so that you would have taken with your future husband or wife arguing about what you'd find acceptable in a divorce or not, worth years of distress + eventual money thrown up arguing
afterwards. It's not pleasant because indeed you
have to consider worst case scenarios, contracts are made for this. But in the case of your worst case scenario it really can help to have things well-defined, well-boundaried, well-made and agreed on right from the beginning.
If someone starts pressuring you to sign
anything and tries to tell you that you
should trust them blindly? That's not just a red flag, it's the entire USSR chanting. It's not the same as someone complaining that you take a thousand years doing it so. I did irritate many of my friends by reading the fine prints but hey, when they had an issue guess who they come see to get a refund or advice.
So I guess the idea behind really isn't about whether you are a control freak or a bit tight on procedures, it's about the idea behind that people or companies are there to get to you. On this, I think that
initially most people do operate trying to do okay but once they get embroiled in the complexity of things what is best for them isn't necessarily the best for you, and people and companies might care or not for how it's gonna affect you vs. their own interest. On this I'm just neutral/cynical. It will depend on the actor, and there is a point where interests simply don't or won't converge, and this is why we have contracts and boundaries. It's not good or bad, it doesn't mean that people around you are flat out immoral or ill-intentioned but you don't need to be evil to create a lot of problems. I just try to remain aware of this.
Also having basic routines of reading contracts will avoid most of the scams.
Red flags are:
- requiring huge speed of decision
- pressuring to sign without reading
- constantly reminding of the advantages
- promoting changes or rearrangements without being explicit about what it entails
- avoiding any possible disagreement and dodging questions about what happens if said disagreement happens
- requiring data they won't give themselves
- looking to good to be true
- not willing to give the details of the contract or define terms clearly
- …
And the above can happen with people as well as with companies.
A bank that suddenly suggests that you change your investment pattern? What's their interest in doing it so? Is that interest aligned with yours? What are your options if/when your interests don't align anymore? It could very much be a win-win as well as being just the new policy of the bank trying to enrol more people for reasons that aren't even necessarily bad, but might simply be the bad choice. I'm not even assuming that it could be a large-scale scam (which does happen btw), but simply
scanning for these things is important.
Then there is also the force factor which is, are you capable of enforcing your rights even when it's the other that is breaching the contract. Err, an entire other domain, and there you have to navigate with a trust compass. And again, anything that requires you to give something before getting something, no matter what paper they did sign, if they disappear with your money they disappear with your money. But generally these things can be avoided by behaving always with the same checks and in the same ways and having a few things that you simply
never do because it would be a risk. If the other party doesn't want to understand your boundaries, major red flag.
On your paperwork issue.
What you gonna do. It is what it is. 
