Mashkal

Edge is Chrome, under the hood.
 
Personally, I disable Cortana and automatic 'search the web from the taskbar' features entirely. If I'm typing a search query into the OS, I'm looking for something on my PC.  If I wanted to search the Internet, I'd be on Google. Stop wasting time asking Bing where my documents are!

Edge is one of the least offensive parts of modern windows in my opinion, to the extent it’s my default browser of choice on any windows 10 machines I own.
It just doesn’t really seem to do anything too obstructive. 

Don't really get the hate for Edge. It's a browser and it works, it has a couple of annoying things, but don't they all?
It might not be packed with the same features as Chrome, but that's no reason to totally crap on it, use Chrome if you're so bothered.
Windows pushes it because it's a Microsoft product, I'm not sure what else you were expecting, that's not a fault with Edge but a fault with Windows itself.

Well, I didn't end up booting off of the external drive. But, I did manage to run some programs directly off the drive, so.. mission  partly accomplished.