Welcome to the Mac side!
There are a few developers that I know of that graduated from the Henry Ford School of Software Development. Henry Ford is known for making only black cars because that was what he thought people should want. reference
When you use Bookends, you get the reference manager that the developer thinks you want. To go a bit further, you get the reference manager that he thinks you wanted several years ago. These design and implementation details, it seems, are not generally subject to revision. For example, the user interface and the interactions needed to work with the software. If the software works for you as it is now, that’s fine, but know that any feature you might hope for will probably not be implemented. He did put something back the way it was, which had broken my Keyboard Maestro workaround for Bookends not having tag lookup or autocompletion.
There is currently a bug in Bookends where it creates three entries (two empty) for each paper it imports from the folder it watches for new papers. The developer can’t reproduce the bug, and has washed his hands of it. I have put some time into trying to figure out what the problem might be, but ultimately, this is not my bug to fix. To me, this is not good support. I have fixed bugs I couldn’t reproduce in applications I wrote, and fixed bugs that caused issues no one noticed. If you can potentially live with any bugs that might come up, then this won’t be an issue.
I’m still new to Zotero, so don’t have a list of complaints. Looks like @ryanjamurphy has that covered.
I frankly don’t find the Bookends UI to feel more native than Zotero. It has its own idiosyncrasies. Maybe I’m missing something, here are two screenshots for comparison:
