Yes, verification is a strictly simpler problem, and one that's fairly thoroughly addressed by existing research -- which is why people working specifically on AI safety are paying attention to other things.

This doesn't really seem true to me. We are currently pretty bad at software verification, only able to deal with either fairly simple properties or fairly simple programs. I also think that people in verification do care about the "specification problem", which is roughly problem 2 above (although I don't think anyone really has that many ideas for how to address it).