It takes a lot of handwavium to make for an easy Cretan victory, much less one at Malta. Plus they don't have the sealift to support a Cyprus operation (though it WAS proposed). In some ways, Crete was almost a mini-Midway for the German paratroopers. Up until that time, it seemed (except to the paratroopers) that everything had gone so easily for them...
Also, it would have taken a British PM other than Winston Churchill to order an evacuation of Crete prior to the German landings, which you need for an easy German victory. There was no way Winston would have let slip away the chance to set up a potential strategic bomber base within range of the Ploesti oilfields.
The Crete Air Assault was a shoestring operation for the Germans in which the proposed sea landings utterly failed (on the first day, at least) and all the air drops failed as well, at least initially. Only the quick thinking of local German commanders sending in the last of the para reserves, and the foolish actions of one New Zealand battalion commander in withdrawing from the critical Hill 107 overlooking Maleme Airfield, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
Malta takes all those problems and multiplies them with the fact that the British had a much more concentrated defense. There were only a very limited number of very heavily defended objectives. The Germans would be airdropping in circumstances in which their only hope of salvation would be the surface fleet of the Italian Navy. In one of his fleeting bursts of wisdom, Hitler denounced Operation: Hercules on the basis that his paratroopers would be abandoned by Mussolini's sailors and left to fend for themselves.
As to the Russian front? A divisional level assault on the Russian Front simply was not workable. The speed of German advances in 1941-42 meant by the time the Fallschirmjager could plan and organize an operation the objective would already have been taken by ground forces. Also, NKVD forces and the overall concentration of Soviet troops in Soviet rear echelon areas essentially made such air insertions by a single division suicidal.

And once air superiority was lost...