Like to see the battlefields. Want a full set of topographic maps, also of approaches and exits. Very curious about tactical maneuver possibilities.
You mention "looking at the fields of fire". I was still looking every second for fields of fire until about 1975, eight years since I left the war. Tiresome, that was!
That damned war was so Napoleonic. None of that "hold them by the nose and kick them in the ass", as George Scott put it in "Patton". Just Napoleonic collisions.
Thomas Jonathan Jackson saw the possibilities of maneuver, but it was about impossible to get the men to get the job done by walking on their own two feet. They kept complaining that they were too tired, too thirsty (water supply for a marching column was criminally bad in that war), too hungry, too cold, and barefoot. So we got blood baths like Antietam - Sharpsburg.
At Gettysburg the exposed Union left was ignored. A five mile forced march by Longstreet's Corps would have forced the Northerners to attact in order to break out of near encirclement. The Southerners could have won the whole war right there, routed the Northerners, then occupied the District. Amazing.
You're looking in the wrong theater for the war of maneuver. Not surprising since the academics who have made such a big project out of it are too damn lazy to get more than a easy cab fare from the National Archives to go to where the CW was really fought. Go west. Go west. Sherman's last, and I might add, nearly bloodless, campaign covered nearly 400 miles--through the Edisto Swamps in late winter flood. If Joe Johnston hadn't been foolish enough to pull an R.E.Lee-style attack at Bentonville, the casualties would have been trifling--that is in terms of the CW's other campaigns. As it was Johnston's entire army couldn't defeat one-third of the XIV Army Corps (the Old Dependables) who dug in their heels and held on until reinforced.
And if Lee would have surrounded 'Ole Snappin' Turtle' at G'burg, what would he have done? Throw rocks. Meade was bright enough not to have surrendered his Ordnance train--and he had a large, fresh, unused Army Corps (the Sixth) to defend it. Lee had a twenty+ mile long train of wounded to try to care for and no ammunition for his artillery to speak of, low ammunition for his infantry and no rations. Not to mention the other 2 Union Armies of about 80,000 men coming in relief of the Army of the Potomac from the Department of the East and the Department of West Virginia. But you're right on one point, the war would have been over then.