Thanks for the episode. Here are some observations
Books - not just “needs polishing” but they actually took a wrecking ball to its metadata as reported in this thread: Your favorite Monterey features? - #6 by Diane
Giant leap backwards for the Books app. The table view where you can edit metadata is gone. I can’t see how to edit metadata at all. I use Books for PDF manuals for software, hardware and household appliances, but I also have some fiction and non fiction. A fundamental first organizational divide in a library or bookstore is to separate the fiction from the non fiction, but this has never been the case in the Books app. When sorting by Author, Apple-authored manuals appear between Andre Norton and Arthur Conan Doyle. Worse, sorting by author is a random mixture of alphabetical by first name and alphabetical by last name.
Hiding metadata is one of Apple’s worst antipatterns in my opinion, and it’s sad to see Books getting worse rather than better.
Cloud apps generally - Notes, Mail, etc - search fails and you have to take action to fix it. Of course Apple doesn’t help, Google search does turn up fixes for this.
Mail - right now it’s showing yyyy-mm-dd instead of the date on all my email.
Contacts - is there anyone here who doesn’t have duplicated contacts?
Photos - I have duplicates of duplicates. Their metadata is all different. I can’t let an automated app loose on this.
iOS Camera - focus problems if you try to shoot through a window with mesh over it - whether bug screen or tour bus. Once the camera is set on the mesh I have not found a way (other than switching to Halide) to convince it to focus elsewhere.
Part of the problem apart from “scope” is that people have data stores that are over a decade old and the apps have to keep working with legacy data.
When the episode got to the issue of Sherlocking, I once coined the term “Moriarty” for the reverse Sherlock where an Apple app gets outdone by a rival. Can’t remember what prompted this, feel free to suggest any examples!