How do I increase the mouse manipulation speed? It's an awkward question and I don't know how to word it right.
I'm working on a small object about 10cm across. When I want to inset a circular face, I can't do it to the degree I want because Blender sees that I'm zoomed in all the way and so huge mouse movements only make a tiny inset. And because the maximum inset distance is reached when my mouse cursor is over the center of the circle, the space I have to move the mouse is limited. That means I have to either inset many times before I get to the desired amount or I have to zoom out a huge way back but then I can't see what I'm doing.

So the question is, is there any way to increase the amount of manipulation per distance traveled with the mouse during an inset operation, so I can use circular insets on a small scale?

thank you.
While you're doing the inset (or most any transform), you can actually just start typing a number and Blender will use that and ignore your mouse pointer. You can see it in the header at the bottom of the view.

With Inset specifically, the scale appears to be that 1.0 insets all the way to a point at the center of the face, 0.5 is halfway, etc.