For some of us, it's not a continuous feeling; like everything else, there's a bell curve that we fall on somewhere that could depict how much discomfort we feel if we feel we are 'forced' to behave as the sex which we are not. For a true TS, I suppose it's fierce; the constant feeling emanating from your mind that your body is incongruent with what your mind says it is. I only have a little bit of that, but it's enough for me to want to dress/behave as a girl whenever my mind isn't preoccupied with something else more important in the grand scheme of things.
Becoming a 50+ year old woman, no, that wouldn't improve my life at all. I'd be doing the same things I'm doing now, with still virtually no chance at love.
If you gave me the option of becoming an average looking 14 year old girl, then sure, I'd take it, because it might have worked out. After all, I already know that my life as a man turned to crap. I know that trading the problems I had/have with the ones of someone of the opposite sex at that age is simply having a different set of problems to deal with, but I think I could have managed better if I didn't have the boy/girl phenomenon going on in my head all the time, screwing up my relationships and my sex life. Life as a 'normal' girl has to be better than life as TS/TG/CD.