doktorgun replied to your post: there are So many people doing high school physics...
The range is longer, the duration is longer, and it can lift more. Most importantly, it can drag. Hallway filled with pressure plate traps? Sit around the corner, have the Unseen Servant drag a 60-pound bag of rocks through it. (Also Unseen Servant can be cast as a Ritual, which makes it free, in exchange for ten minutes of casting time.)
eh we rarely pay close enough attention to range and weight that mage hand isnt gonna do all that stuff. als unrelated but one of my first experiences with dnd was some 4e module where there was like a big rune in a room so someone volunteered to disarm it and i very pointedly retreated outside, closed and barricaded the door so nothing inside could possibly hurt me, only for the rune to go off and specifically hurt people outside the room
