Thwomp

I not sure how you could get the angle to almost 90 degrees unless you're just resting them loosely on the angled studs instead of pushing the angled bars into the holes on the plates beneath the speeders. If you're inexperienced with Lego then perhaps you missed the fact that the plates on the bottom of the speeders have holes you can push bars through. Beyond that it's hard to say without a picture. It's should just be a transparent bar pushed into some leafy bits with the angled stud sitting on the top, which is 45 degrees. There shouldn't be anything else introducing more of an angle.

The final position only "locks in" one set of wings, the others need to be helped in position but remain looser. With the correction I (and I assume @20feet too) made the wings are perfectly aligned throughout the opening and closing process, and lock in together. Speculation time: I believe there is some slight wiggle room for the worm gears in the assembly, this is what allowed me to pry open the second set of wings the rest of the way. Turning the worm gear 180 degrees (assuming that is correct - it has been too long since I adjusted mine) aligns everything so that the wiggle room is the equal on both sides, and therefore eliminated when the wings are fully opened or closed, as they've been pushed up or down in sync. Between those two points the wings feel a lot looser as the worm gears are free to slide up and down on the technic bar again.

I did the same as you. Thankfully it's easy enough to pull off a few parts and realign things, but I built and realigned that section perfectly according to the instructions multiple times and it never worked for me. The only time the wings worked was when I offset the gears, unfortunately I can't remember by how much, but your 180 degrees sounds about right.

I've noticed variation between the plastic finish on figures before, but never just a single leg. Any inconsistencies I've had have been from multiple copies of the same set, and it has been the entire assembly rather than just one piece, so I assumed they were coming from different factories. If it bothers you (which is understandable considering they're mismatched legs) then you should contact Lego and they'll send out replacements.

I just built this, it's easily my favourite model (in Lego form) of the X-Wing I've ever built, the only concern being the stress placed on the handcuff pieces - but as I have so many of those lying around I just sucked it up. I did make a few tweaks I thought people might be interested in (sorry if they've been mentioned before), which makes the ship feel a lot more stable to play with for me: A 1x1 tile can be placed on each of the 1x1 bracket pieces on the shoulders of the cockpits. This prevents them from dropping down too far, and keeps them pretty much perfectly aligned with the cockpit canopy. It almost feels intentional, and I wonder if it was just missed out of the instructions. A flower piece with four petals (33291) can be placed in the top centre anti stud of the top fuselage nose cover thing (...sorry for that awful description), and if aligned correctly, it should lock into place between the plates in there to hold it more securely. I also used an extra plate and 1x1 brick on the other end of the fuselage nose cover thing, which slides perfectly between the plates near the nose and prevents that area from feeling so squishy and fragile.