Photoshop Magic Wand take transparency into account?

The problem is that I actually wanted Magic Wand to take into account alpha the same way it does the red, green and blue channels, so I could use a threshold and have it select some of the pixels that were only slightly transparent. It's very unintuitive that setting Magic Wand to 0 threshold can select pixels that are not visually identical as the pixels I clicked on. I wasted a good half an hour trying to figure out what I did wrong to make it select pixels that weren't the same, even with 0 threshold. I honestly expected more from Adobe. This is the kind of thing where people just shrug and say "idk man, that's just the way it is" but there's no excuse for it. It's unintuitive, nonsensical behaviour and it would be so incredibly easy to provide an option for it.

Also wouldn't it be much faster and easier to just ctrl+click the layer thumbnail to make a selection based on transparency instead of going through the pretty awkward Load Selection workflow?

Wow, I can't believe I didn't think of that. That's a ridiculously simple solution. Create a new layer under the layer I'm selecting, fill with it black, turn on Sample All Layers and make selection. Works perfectly.

I actually figured that it was selecting the transparent pixels because the pixels were the same on the RGB channels, even if the alpha channel was different, so I went searching and found you can essentially split the alpha layer out (Layer Mask > From Transparency) so I did that and then shift-clicked the layer mask to disable it so I could edit the pixels without their transparency, then used the Channels tab to turn on the alpha channel and turn off the RGB channels so I could make my selection based on the transparency alone, then turned the RGB channels back on and the alpha channel off, inverted my selection and filled the layer's RGB pixels with black. Now I can make the selection quickly with the magic wand tool whenever I need it.

I don't see why mods are allowed to mark an answer as accepted. That sounds like a terrible idea because, as evidenced on this post where a mod incorrectly marked the first reply as correct, they can be wrong. Only the OP can know for sure if an answer solves their problem. And for the record I still think it's totally stupid that Photoshop assumes I don't care about transparency, without even giving me an option to change the behaviour... but at least there's an easy workaround.

Ok, first of all, WTF, why can someone else mark an answer correct?? I thought only Microsoft was stupid enough to allow that.

Second, thanks for trying to help but that doesn't solve the problem. As you can see there's still a heap of transparent pixels selected that are completely different to the pixels I clicked on (i.e. they're transparent while the ones I clicked are opaque; with 0 tolerance, there should be no tolerance for difference, including alpha):