You are being unreasonable. I worked in Swedish state run day care for years. The official state day care centres have a ratio of staff/children that would make UK childcare providers weep with envy.
Firstly parents in Sweden have 18 months paid parental leave, 3 months of which MUST be taken out by the other parent, or it is not paid out. Up until then men had found it difficult to ask for their full quota of parental leave, so this gave men an excuse to tell their jobs that they were absolutely forced to take out their 3 months "pappaledig" because otherwise the state would snaffle the money. Having sole care of the children without being supervised by their female partners allowed them to develop their own ways of doing the work. Which made a massive difference in how confident fathers feel when looking after their own children, thereby making it much more likely that child care responsibilities are shared more fairly (still not 50/50 of course) between parents, since dad has already managed to book child health care appointments, or playdates without the aid of their social secretary/partner.
People WANT to send their children to day care, not in order to warehouse them during the day while the parents have to work, but because it teaches them so much that they don't learn at home. How to get on in a group, how to be empathetic to others, how to share. Then there is the child sized furniture, and the massive amount of indoor and outdoor toys to stimulate motor functions and develop basic skills.
In Stockholm, where I worked, most day nurseries are purpose build, and have 3 or 4 child care groups, each with their own regular staff, sharing a kitchen (with an employed cook), and a wet room for play where the children can be naked and cover themselves in mud or paint and be sluiced off afterwards. An outdoor play space with climbing frames, sand play and a flat space for trundling round on wheeled toys.
When I started working it was normal for the children to be divided into groups by age. So the very youngest children (6 months to 3 years old) were in a group of no more than 8 children with 3 full time staff (working a rota covering the hours between 6.30 am - 6.30pm) and a couple of part time staff who turned up in time to push the double buggies when they trundled out after breakfast to head to a local park or place of interest, and cover lunch breaks afterwards.) They had baby toys and a very quiet environment, with lots of naps and story times.
As the children neared the age when they could move to one of the other groups with older children (age 4-7) they were eager to go and get their little hands on all the good stuff that the older children had access to. They'd come and visit the group they were going to move to several times a week in the weeks leading up to the change over.
(Children starting day care for the first time had a three week hand over period, where a parent would accompany them. Then, after a couple of days, once they were playing happily, the parent would sneak off for a few minutes to have a cup of coffee in the staff room, ready to come back straight away if the child noticed their absence and got distressed. Gradually they'd spend longer and longer away from the child, until by the time the three weeks were up and most children were comfortably settled with their new friends and all the interesting stuff available.) Some children did still cry when being left in the morning (mostly the ones whose parents insisted on interrupting their play to say "daddy/mummy is going away now, I'm leaving you, I need to go to work" etc until the child started sobbing. The same children would often react with anger when their parents came to collect them, saying they were too busy playing and didn't want to go home yet.)
Breakfast was around 8am, though many children didn't turn up until 9, which was when the important activities started. Parents arriving after 9 without a valid excuse had it made clear that they were disrupting their child's day and depriving them of important bonding activities.
The 4 - 7 year olds started their day just after 9am, sitting in a circle with staff, they got to take it in turns to pull yesterday's date off the calendar block, talk about what day it was, what the weather was doing, what season of the year it was, or anything else that was a topic of interest and relevant for children in that age group, and what was going to be happening that day. They learnt to take turns, to let others talk without interrupting, and generally be considerate, without even noticing, because they were so captivated by the discussion and the chances they had to be the centre of attention.
Between 10 and 12 we'd be playing outdoors, either playing or doing something educational. Like, when fish and fishing had been a subject of interest one morning, taking the entire group of 12 children on a bus ride to the local food hall, to look at the different kinds of fish on their beds of ice, buy some whole (mercifully gutted) fish and take them back for the cook to make into lunch. The little ghouls actually ate the fish too, much to the surprise of many parents.
Lunch was another pedagogic experience. We staff got paid to eat lunch with the children (our meals were free because we were working). I was amazed when I found out that teachers in the UK have to pay for their own meals when they eat alongside the children. I would not have wanted to pay for a meal that was usually cold before I got round to it, since I would be kept busy helping the 5 children at my dinner table to peel their potatoes and cut up their meat (not to mention serving the whole fish so that they didn't get any bones). Nobody left the table without permission, and at the end of the meal they climbed down from their chairs and carried their plates, cutlery and glasses over to the dishwasher and carefully made sure to put them in the right place. Much to the astonishment of parents, who said they had no idea their child could do that. The trick being that the small children emulate the older children, so we staff didn't really have to do more than keep an eye on the procedure.
After lunch was story hour and nap time while we staff took turns to have our own lunch breaks. The back outdoors again for the rest of the afternoon to play with the outdoor toys. If it was absolutely pouring down, or 25 degrees below zero we might come back indoors a bit earlier, but everyone had the proper clothes for the weather, and a big crate of lost clothing to dip into when someone didn't have thermal tights or had lost a glove.
In summer, when most Swedes take 6 weeks off to go and sit in their country cottages in the middle of the forest, we'd often only have 4 or 5 children in the entire building. So we'd pack a picnic and 6 staff and 5 children would catch a train or bus to the coast and spend the day playing in the water or lying in the sun, before heading back in time for them to be collected. That had been the tradition since state day care first opened back in the 1930s. Sadly I only got to enjoy it for a few years, before the bean counters realised that they could save huge amounts of money by closing most of the day care centres during the summer months, forcing the staff to take their holidays, and just have a few day care centres open, filled with all the children whose parents had to work during the summer. Which was sad, because it was stressful for the children to be thrust into a group of children and adults that they didn't know, and the staff didn't have the time to take them on long day trips, so they mostly had short trips to local play parks and afternoons spent in the day care grounds.
The only time I was alone with the children was when it was my turn to open up, when I'd be alone for the first half hour after 6.30 in the morning, during which time 2 or 3 early birds would arrive. By breakfast at 8 o'clock there would be 3 of us staff in each group, and 7 or 8 children between the ages of 4 and 7 would have arrived (the babies had a higher staff to child ratio). When we went to the park I never had more than 4 children to keep an eye on, unless another member of staff took some children to the toilet and asked me to keep an eye on those of her group that wanted to stay and play.
Before I left they changed the age segregation system, and started making every day care group a "family group" with children from 9 months to 7 years old. The staff who had worked all their lives in the baby group were very upset by it, and some of them decided to retire rather than face the hurly burly of a mixed age group. I thought it was not really in the best interests of the children, because although some toddlers thrive in a busy noisy group of mixed aged children some of the more sensitive ones did not. I remember one little boy who would just sit on the floor holding his arms up and crying to be picked up. Either someone carried him or he cried his heart out. Luckily there were still enough staff for us to be able to give him the care he needed, and he soon became the pet of some of the older girls who loved playing with him, so he did integrate into the group eventually. But if we'd had several children with the same needs I think they would have suffered.
I often wonder how child minders in the UK manage, when they are often completely alone with several toddlers. How do they manage to give each child the attention they need, when do they have their lunch and tea/coffee breaks? Or go to the toilet in peace? In fact, come to think of it, how do they change nappies on one toddler while keeping an eye on all the others? We never left a group of children unsupervised, if we had to leave for some reason we'd ask another member of staff to keep an eye on things till we got back.
Also, our wages weren't great, but they were enough to live on (just) as a single person, pay our hefty Swedish taxes and our union dues. The way "caring" jobs are paid in the UK shows how poorly the work traditionally carried out by women is valued.