It will get easier with time. It has for me. Don’t give up the tenor either. You like the sound. Stick with it. I went down to concert but came back up to tenor and baritone. Your fingers will stretch in time. That’s the hard part of learning. It takes time and work.
A friend of mine went to a jazz guitar class with the great John McLaughlin. Someone complained that some of the chords actually hurt to make them. McLaughlin said they hurt him too. Lyle Ritz called them knucklebusters. They get easier. Sometimes you want the harder version of that Fmaj7 because it puts the melody note on the first string whereas the 5500 might not. You often want to use the chord shape that puts the melody note on the first or second string. Everything below becomes the harmony. Often you don’t play anything above the melody note.
Chord shapes are called voicings, the order of the notes in the chord. CEG is a C chord but so is GEC or EGC, and since you have four strings on a uke you can double any of these notes to get certain sounds. Chord voicing is as important as just playing chords. Once you start carefully choosing your chord voicings you become much more musical and therefore a better player.
One great player said that a trick that often works to great effect is choosing voicings that are close together. They sound good because the notes don’t take giant leaps and they are easier to change between each other.
Get Roy Sakuma’s chord book and start learning the basic four voicings for the chords you use. Play around with combining them in the progressions of the songs you’re learning. Your ears will open.
Start for example with C Am F G or G7. Play it using different combinations of chord shapes, voicings, chord positions, whatever you want to call them. You’ll find yourself on different places on the neck. What do you like?
Play the progression by switching through voicings. That gives variety.
Just screwing around with different voicings of Fmaj7 and using them as a sort of progression. Do whatever strum or picking feels good but go from:
5557 to 5500 to 2413. These are all voicings of the Fmaj7. I haven’t really analyzed them to see whether any of the notes of the full Fmaj7 are left out. Those would be FACE, E being the maj 7 note. A regular 7 would have Eb.
5557=CFAE cool all notes there
5500=CFEA cool all notes there
2413=AEFC cool all notes there. Now I know.
So the movement of these three voicings produces a movement on the first string of e to a to c
There’s a big jump from the e to the open a.
Try this progression of voicings instead:
5557 to 2413 to 5500. Now you’re going from e to c to a, a little sweeter, a little more musical.
You’re not changing the chord, only the voicing. See what a difference it makes? So if you see the chords for a song and it says C Am F G, just knowing one way to play those chords ain’t really doing the song justice. You have to figure out which voicings and combinations of voicing do the song justice. Get that Sakuma book.
I’m at the point where I’m figuring out the best voicing for jazz chords. Glen Rose’s Jazzy uke lessons have really helped me make better choices and substitutions that make movements sweeter and easier. Takes time and effort but then I’ve always loved music and I got serious about theory with the uke. Wish I had done it in my teens or earlier. Coltrane supposedly said the more you know the more you can blow. Bach might have said something similar in a less colloquial way.
Good luck.