Yeah, every drive vendor seems to have variations on "the standard" for S.M.A.R.T. data. That's why the tools (eg. smartctl on Linux) have databases of known drives to help them interpret the values for us, so we don't have to.

I agree, a single "worst" value isn't as informative as we'd like, but there's no standard for providing more than just that one number from the drive. A nice historical graph would be much better, but no such thing unless the box's software monitors and logs the temperatures over time. Many do, though.

Cheers