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I don't have a lot of respect for the three-act structure for exactly the reason you've run into: It doesn't get you any mileage out of the second act. In fact, I'm going to go further than that: The 3-act structure suggests that there's one structure that's appropriate for every story. I don't think that's the case at all!

There are as many ways of structuring a second act as there are stories. Some stories have incredibly obvious structures that stick out as you watch them, giving them a rhythmic sense of deliberately moving forward and a poetic parallelism between parts of the journey. Others have very ad-hoc structures, where the only thing that really defines one section of the story from another is that one necessarily leads to the other. And there's everything in-between. This is where both the challenge and the fun of figuring out your second act comes in: You get to decide what your own structure is going to look like!

As an example of a story with a very structured second act, consider the movie _Scott Pilgrim Versus the World_. In this movie, our hero Scott is trying to grow closer to his girlfriend. But she isn't ready to commit to a relationship yet because of all of the exes she's had over the years. So, in the highly stylized, video-game like world of the story, Scott needs to personally confront and defeat each of the exes. The structure is incredibly straightforard: Act 1 is establishing the quest. Act 3 is overcoming the finial, most powerful ex - and Scott also overcoming his deepest personal fears, ones that go deeper than losing his girl. And act 2 is broken up, like clockwork, into one chapter per ex. Each ex is introduced with a particular character and way of battling Scott. Scott figures out what he needs to do to overcome them. And then the fight. Along the way, each fight gradually sheds a little more light on what Scott's true problem is, making the reveal that he needs to dig deeper than impressing his girlfriend to complete his quest land very satisfyingly.

The fact that this movie follows such an obvious and predictable formula _is not a bad thing_! On the contrary, it gives the story a very strong sense of momentum. We can track Scott's progress very easily, making the anticipation of the final battle all the more exciting. The pattern each ex follows makes each chapter have a strong sense of parallelism, making comparing what each ex means to the story a very natural way of exploring it more deeply. And the fact that there's an underlying theme of deeper self-acceptance gradually revealed _across_ each chapter makes its slow reveal much weightier. It's one of a small number of elements that transcends the structure, cementing it as the most important theme of the story.

On the other hand, you have stories that are very ad-hoc in structure. Instead of following any kind of episodic approach, they allow each event to naturally build into the next one. Terrey Pratchett's novel _Going Postal_ does this. At the start of the novel, the oddly-named Moist von Lipwig, a petty criminal, is strong-armed by a powerful despot into taking one of the most unpleasant jobs in the story's world - getting the city's long-dilapitated post office back up and running. At first, this seems to be the story. The post office is broken down, von Lipwig needs to get it running again, short and to the point. But as von Lipwig and the post office gain traction, they are attacked by mysterious assassins, making it clear that someone powerful wants the post office to fail. This builds up into a mystery that takes up the next portion of the story and leads up to von Lipwig discovering a cutthroat capitalist whose modern communications empire is threatened by the post office. In the final part of the story, von Lipwig and the evil businessman go toe-to-toe, building up to a final competition that will decide forever whether the post office or the evil corporation gets to be the most powerful company in the city.

Unlike Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, this story doesn't have a clear episodic structure. Each of these developments bleed into each other, and there's no clear specific moments where we transition from one to the next. But each plot point happens as an inexorable consequence of the previous. Terry Pratchett knew he wanted us to start at a small post office and end up battling a corrupt mega-conglomerate, and so he used his second act to organically build the bridge from one to the other.

Theses are just two examples. There really isn't a right or wrong way to structure your second act. But deliberately deciding how you're going to do so breaks your second act down from one monolithic, impossible-to-wrangle blank page into multiple sections you can tackle confidently, and a carefully-planned structure will build your story up satisfyingly.