yoyo has succinctly described my intuition for orthogonal transformations in the comments: from polarization you know that you can recover the inner product from the norm and vice versa, so knowing that a linear transformation preserves the inner product ($\langle x, y \rangle = \langle Ax, Ay \rangle$) is equivalent to knowing that it preserves the norm, hence the orthogonal transformations are precisely the linear isometries.
I'm a little puzzled by your comment about rotations and reflections because for me a rotation is, by definition, an orthogonal transformation of determinant $1$. (I say this not because I like to dogmatically stick to definitions over intuition but because this definition is elegant, succinct, and agrees with my intuition.) So what intuitive definition of a rotation are you working with here?
As for the transpose and symmetric matrices in general, my intuition here is not geometric. First, here is a comment which may or may not help you. If $A$ is, say, a stochastic matrix describing the transitions in some Markov chain, then $A^T$ is the matrix describing what happens if you run all of those transitions backwards. Note that this is not at all the same thing as inverting the matrix in general.
A slightly less naive comment is that the transpose is a special case of a structure called a dagger category, which is a category in which every morphism $f : A \to B$ has a dagger $f^{\dagger} : B \to A$ (here the adjoint). The example we're dealing with here is implicitly the dagger category of Hilbert spaces, which is relevant to quantum mechanics, but there's another dagger category relevant to a different part of physics: the $3$-cobordism category describes how space can change with time in relativity, and here the dagger corresponds to just flipping a cobordism upside-down. (Note the similarity to the Markov chain example.) Since relativity and quantum mechanics are both supposed to describe the time evolution of physical systems, it's natural to ask for ways to relate the two dagger categories I just described, and this is (roughly) part of topological quantum field theory.
The punchline is that for me, "adjoint" is intuitively "time reversal." (Unfortunately, what this has to do with self-adjoint operators as observables in quantum mechanics I'm not sure.)