why do the hours of daylight get "longer" in the evening and not during the morning? Official sunrise has barely moved (15 minutes) in the morning but sunset is 45 minutes later in comparison.

Or maybe I'm just insane.

That's because the Earth is tilted a little to the left.

This explanation comes from the land down under but the principle is the same, just the timimg of the summer solstice and winter solstice are opposite ours in the northern hemisphere.

It has to do with the fact that our orbit of the sun isn't a perfectly symetrical event. While the winter solstic is the shortest day of the year, the sunset has already been happening later in the day for a little bit. Immediately after the winter solstice, the amount of time the sunset is happening later has begun to exceed the amount of time the sunrise is happening later, thus making the days longer. It's not until a little after the winter solstic that the sunrises actually start happening sooner as well, at which point the days start increasing in length much faster.

As stated above, the Earth's orbit isn't a perfectly symmetrical circle, but rather an ellipse.  At the closest point to the sun, the Earth is travelling faster than at more distant points, and the Earth's angle around the sun changes more rapidly.  This means that the Earth has to rotate farther to line a given point up with the Sun ("local noon") than when the Earth is farther away and traveling more slowly.  As a result, the actual length of a solar day ("local noon") is usually somewhat shorter or longer than 24 hours.  This means that in addition to the day time length increasing, its center point is also shifting, and as a result the sunrise and sunset times do not shift at the same rate most of the time.  Solar noon varies by about a half hour throughout the year compared to the standard 24 hour clock.

Mike

ETA:  This also means that although the Equator is generally considered to have 12 hours of daylight every day, this isn't (quite) true, and sunset and sunrise times will both change throughout the year.  When the Earth is closer to the sun, the local day will be slightly longer than 24 hours and the night will also be longer.  The difference is only a few seconds per day, however, so you wouldn't notice unless you were to compare it to a clock.

Mike

https://www.universetoday.com/126512/solar-analemma-the-2015-sun-in-one-picture/

And the earths actual speed around rthe sun is not actually a constant.

It varies depending on the position in the orbit.

Aren't ellipses fun?

This is one of the things it took Kepler so long to figure out based solely on earth based observations.
At least he had others that did most of the observations and measurements (Tycho Brahe).

Notice how the analemma does not cross exactly in the middle?