I know we're way OT for this list, but there's some points that rang too many bells for me not to answer:
I've written to Schiller and Jobs about 2 years ago, outlining my list of issues and all that did was get me on a defective beta program of people who felt they were special for being on that program.
I complained vociferously about 10.7 on Apple Support Communities from July 20th 2011 onwards and by September of the same year got the same response - enrolled in AppleSeed. I have said there and elsewhere (so no greater harm accumulates from saying it here), that I've always thought that that was a rather obvious way to silence my criticisms. Needless to say, it didn't work. BTW, your characterisation of other people on that program is very similar to my own first impressions of some of the most vociferous people in the community, but I'd hesitate to say that the most vociferous are representative of the majority. There are some good people in that program.
This clearly shows that high level decision makers at Apple have clearly lost the focus on creating an OS that "just works" and one that doesn't waste our time.
Unlike some of the esteemed members of this list, I haven't been involved with Apple since the invention of traffic lights (or shortly thereafter…). I bought my first computer in 1990 - an Acorn RISC A5000, a machine that still knocks anything built ever since out of the water in terms of its fundamental architecture and stability. Alas, due to poor marketing, this piece of superior technology went out of business. I then spent 10 years suffering various PC hardware and Microsoft software until I finally alighted on an Apple iBook G4 in 2004. I quickly recognised that it was i. a different kind (not degree) of machine from any of the horrible things I'd been using for the past decade and ii. was kindred in its robustness and aesthetic spartan-ness to the RISC machines I'd had in the past. I've been with Apple ever since.
Apologies for the IT biography, but here's the rub: from 2004 to 2011 I never had ONE single crash or user issue on my macs. Because of that, I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT my operating system (what's a user library? If you'd asked me that prior to the release of Lion I'd have said "Dunno, don't need to know'). In contrast, I knew all about the innards of Windows 95 because, like everyone else, if you didn't learn how to beat the Windows OS with a stick, well, you just didn't get any work done. And now, here we are, in the post 10.7 world, and I know more about the innards of my mac than any USER should ever know. And didn't they say all those changes were supposed to make the mac easier to use…?
Long way to get to a simple point: everything since July 20th 2011 has made the Mac LESS easier to use as far as I'm concerned, has made it more necessary to find out what's going on under the hood, precisely the opposite of the rationale given for all the changes.
Now I shouldn't complain too much because I kinda like knowing more about macs than most other people (outside of this list, of course!). But the point is it gives the lie to all this "we're trying to simplify things for the user' philosophy. Nope. You made them harder. And you made people like me (someone who became a blogger who writes OS X help tips for other simply because I had to figure out what the hell was going on myself) more necessary than before. Kinda like owning Windows 95 So given the stated aims, I'd say that's a big fail.