Hehe, another adventurer at heart, welcome to the club. I'm old to mead (coming up on 19 years) but new to bees (second year now).
I pretty much do all my batches with fruit in primary, because I came from a winemaking background, where if you don't ferment your fruit... you have fruit juice. Or fermented sugar water... I guess what I'm saying is the mental exercise is, do you want mead with the flavour you get from fruit juice added, or the flavour you get from wine added? Grape juice is a very different thing from wine, just as apple juice is a very different thing from hard cider. And in my experience, blackberries have zero taste UNTIL they're fermented (might just be me, I admit to being a weirdo, Squatchy can attest to that!!)
And you did cite that you've got rocket fuel, that may well be masking fruit flavour to some extent too. Without seeing your recipes, I can't tell if you tried to go way too alcoholic or if you used a yeast known for making rocket fuel without temperature control, but that may well be another factor. Try deglazing a pan with a splash of it, or poaching some mild fruit with some and give a sniff, I have one dry cherry wine that tastes like nothing at all until it's heated.
Peach is one I haven't tried (I don't live where they grow and when they're in season I'm too busy eating them to ferment them) but from reading what others have said over the years about using peaches, it's extremely subtle and it can be difficult to get a lot of flavour from peaches, so if I were going to try making peach mead, that would be one fruit I would definitely reserve some fruit for secondary in case the flavour is lost to primary.
I usually find orange flavour comes through fermentation quite well, but without seeing your recipe, I can't tell whether you used the zest or not, and if you didn't, well, there's nearly no orange flavour in orange juice compared to adding the zest of the orange, and that's not just with winemaking/meadmaking, I learned that one from making grapefruit preserves that tasted like very sweet nothing because I only used the fruit and not any of the zest.
My first batch of mead from my own honey is going to be using what I drained off the cappings, plus the rinse water from the cappings. If you're experimenting, there is literally nothing wrong with doing bench trials with Costco honey, or whatever you can get at an acceptable price if your own liquid gold is too precious to experiment with, but I'd highly suggest trying at least one traditional with it just so you have a baseline for how your honey tastes fermented and how sweet or dry you prefer it, it's good knowledge to have before you start playing with fruit. Sometimes when something's too dry, the flavours are kind of muted too, especially if it's kinda rocket fuelly.