I am one that is impressed compared to what came before. I'll take the current situation over having to juggle com ports, bit rates, parity bits and jumpers manually. And I'm glad to have a serial link win out over parallel. Some of those crazy parallel cables were getting unwieldily.

I do wish though that USB had stayed as a low speed interface mostly for keyboards and such. For a while it seemed like that was going to be the plan, with Firewire filling the need for a higher speed interconnect. It is a shame it took USB till 2008 to catch up to the benefits of Firewire.

Maybe the Type C plug and connector will catch on everywhere, and we can at least simplify that aspect.

I suppose I'm still overall an optimist with this stuff. It is getting better IMHO. Even if it is a design by committee disaster. I think part of the reason I don't see it as terrible is due to stories from my current boss. He had to deal with design by committee issues at a past job in the auto industry. Sorting out regulatory demands from countries around the world while balancing systems that are in a multi ton hunk of metal hurling down the road is difficult and stressful, which is why he's not at that job anymore.