It may be easy to think most of philosophy is "semantic quibbling", but that isn't all of philosophy. Yes a certain area of philosophy, specifically semantics, does talk specifically about such things. However, other areas of philosophy talk about very interesting other questions. For example, consider Ethics. While semantics do play a role, it is hardly a significant one to what the study is trying to understand.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure where you came to this conclusion. The mind body problem can simply be put as follows. There seems to be such a thing as the mind. There seems to be such a thing as the body. What is the relationship between these two things. None of that presupposes any kind of metaphysical explanation. The answers could be that there is no mind, that there is no body, that the mind and the body are the same, or that the mind and the body are different. From these options there are many interesting metaphysical and logical possibilities.
As a crude analogy, it's like looking at this optical illusion:
...but insisting it must be either 1) a candlestick or 2) a pair of human profiles. Refusal to recognize them as both, simultaneously, is what makes the problem 'hard'. If you do see them as both, it's no longer 'hard'. It's not even a problem in the first place.
The problem does not say any such thing. To make your analogy better fit, we might say that there is a candle stick, and that there is a pair of human profiles, but what is the relationship between these two things? To say that the thing (image) is itself both the candlestick and faces is a fair conclusion, and has been played with in philosophy of mind. For example, Identity theorists would say that the mind just is identical to the body. This view has fallen out of favor for what seems to be very good reason, but it was certainly a dominate view for a while in I think the 70's.