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I don't think there's anyone who has used Bluetooth that would say that it's a nice technology from a user perspective. But why is this such a bad user experience and why has it not been fixed in the 25 years it has been around? The only exception is Apple, so it is possible to get it right.

If I was a betting man, I would say that this the root cause for most of our bluetooth issues. A committee trying to predict everything for everyone. 🤔 Contrast with Apple which is an single entity building for specific devices.

Exactly. The lower levels and radio technology in Bluetooth is awesome. It's an extremely robust protocol. It's the upper layers relating to applications that cause all the headache.

Couldn't the SIG also be opinionated on the upper layers to try and drive / steer that towards some sort of good standard?

Think of this as if ICANN would not let people define new domain names but instead have a standardized list of allowed domain names that you can use. The list would be updated with new approved names once a year. That was how the Bluetooth SIG defined the standard.

The effect is that it was nearly impossible to expand on the Bluetooth technology, because the abstraction level was too high. Adding new features was very difficult. To fix this the group added more and more profiles to cover all the use cases that appeared. This did not work out well.

Then came Bluetooth Low Energy. This is actually very different from classic Bluetooth, but unfortunately inherited a lot from the classic that kept the technology from being user friendly. Most new devices today use BLE, but they still suffer from the old stuff.