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I'm all one for structure, and awareness of structure, but some of these paint by number descriptions of the three act structure strike me as going a bit far. Just as you say, one gets stuck trying to figure out exactly what is supposed to happen at every one of these points. 

At the other extreme is the simple principle that readers keep reading as long as they care what happens next. It may be that the three act structure is, in fact, the only structure which keep people caring what happens next, or it may not. But it is certainly not true that any and every plot that hits every mark on the three act plot structure is going to keep the reader reading. You could hit every mark and still not have the reader care a whit. So maybe the focus should be on what keeps the reader caring.

It seems pretty clear that in any story we care about, the hero must be called to adventure and must accept the call. That is act one. 

It seems pretty clear that at the end of the story, the hero must either succeed or fail or reach a different and more satisfying resolution than they set out to find. That is act 3.

In the middle, there must be struggle. We do not care about a competent confident hero who goes out and does the job successfully without opposition. So Act two is about struggle. And it seems pretty well established that there must be two kinds of struggle: a practical struggle against opposition, and a internal struggle against the self. It also seems that there must be some sacrifice involved in both struggles. 

You can probably put a lot more specifics around those, but I'm not sure if they hurt or help. But I don't believe that is where the problems with middles lies. 

Let us say that the middle -- act 2 -- is a series of struggles, and that those struggles probably need to escalate (because is it boring to see Superman defeat Lex Luthor and then rescue a kitten from a tree -- it needs to be the other way round). It follows that some part of the external and internal opposition has to be engaged in each struggle, and that they must provide more serious opposition each time round. 

It follows almost of necessity that at some point in this process the hero is going to look themselves in the mirror and say, am I the sort of person who is willing to take this risk, make this sacrifice, etc. In other words, I am not sure that the mirror moment really needs to be contrived. I think it is inevitable if you have an escalating series of struggles. 

And here I where I think things go wrong, for both outliners and pantsers. If your act two does not have a series of escalating struggles, it is probably because your hero's circumstances in act 1 and their circumstances in act 3 are not far enough apart. There is not enough to struggle with between their starting state and their ending state. In other words, I think that most of the craft here is making sure that Act 1 and Act 3 are far enough apart from each other. Achieve that, and act 2 almost writes itself. But it is often hard to get that distance correct. 

And maybe this is what James Scott Bell is getting at when he says you should write your story from the middle. In other words, that the nature and extent of the struggles in Act 2 are what make the book work or not, and so that hero in Act 1 needs to be low enough, and the goal in act 3 high enough to create the necessary steepness of slope up which the hero must scramble, and on which they will inevitable at the midpoint stop and ask themselves if they want to go on.