I'm not sure how to describe it: the best that I can come up with is that as something gains mass market appeal, the power users (on average the most vocal) are neglected by those they helped succeed in the marketplace.
When I finally updated to the “improved” GarageBand a couple years ago, I went literally months believing that certain features had been entirely removed by the “upgrade”. Then one day I accidentally resized my damned window and entire features reappeared. It turns out that Apple actually has panes HIDING things when they won’t fit, instead of having scroll bars or fading or some hint that there is more.
I thought they were going to slowly improve the new one to have feature key coverage, but so far nada.
https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1536?locale=en_US
You will need to manually unpack it via pkgutil/tar. However, it will won't run under 10.12 since it requires an older version (Mountain Lion) of Apple80211.framework. Assuming you have a copy of the older framework, you can make it work.
Fortunately, someone has already done this work:
My $20 TP-Link router that I bought around 2010 or 2011 is still quite healthy and providing more than sufficient service to my parents' house and is only now starting to fall behind their connection speed (their connection recently got bumped up to 100/5, after being 30/3 for close to a decade)
For the affluent Apple's end of the market, yes.
My next phone was one I bought, a Nexus device from google. Want to get an app on it? Download the SDK and tools, fire up hello world, throw it on your phone and it works.
This is exactly how it is done on iOS too from iOS 7/8. You don't need a Developer Account anymore to put your own apps on your own phone. You need a Dev. Account only if you want to push the app on App Store.
You do not have to use Apple toolchain for building macOS apps, if you are content with the fact, that your binaries might be broken in future macOS releases. With point releases, even. For a case study, see golang.
Lots of debug/admin related stuff is hidden behind the Option key in macOS. Try clicking on the volume or wifi menu extras to see some examples of this.
Quicktime X can't even open a plain .mov file without "Converting" it.
macOS is instead a consumer-electronics abstraction layer for non-technical users, that relies upon and integrates with a UNIX backbone.
Which is to say: Apple (unlike Microsoft until PowerShell) has always assumed that the people who want to get fiddly technical stuff done, know how to use a command line. macOS's "power tools" are CLI tools. macOS's GUI programs, on the other hand, are for the 80% use-cases of regular users. They don't expose niche use-cases, because that functionality was already exposed just fine by a CLI tool, and power users can just use that CLI tool.
Another example of this: a lot of things that would be exposed as checkboxes in some arcane MMC snap-in in Windows, are just exposed as "defaults write ..." in macOS. Why bother building a GUI for a rarely-changed, technical setting, when the CLI is already a perfectly good one?
Why not remove netcat, as well? It opens unencrypted sockets. Or perhaps wget, since it lets you download unencrypted http? Even git has a built in ftp client.
There's nothing at all obsolete about ftp or telnet. They both implement their respective protocols fully and properly.
New devices shouldn't implement ftp or telnet, but that doesn't mean that having the ability to connect to them is no longer something that happens.
I see it the other way as I'll use a shell command by default over a GUI program because it's usually far easier. Typically the GUI programs are the baby ones for the most common cases. But as you add more and more options, the chance for the user to fail to understand what's going on (even the sophisticated user when the number of features shoots way up -- think of MS Word) increases non-linearly.
So in this case: most Apple users buy mass market packaged disks already formatted for Windows, which are easily recognized and reformatted for the Mac. Frankly this distinction here is great: if you bought a bare drive you probably know what you want to do.
FWIW I'm a Mac user myself, though as noted above most of my usage is in the Terminal.
They generally seem to have few qualms releasing a reboot that does not have feature parity with its predecessor.
One thing that I learned over the years is: let Apple provide the hardware and the OS, but prefer third-party software of proven vendors (Agilebits, Omni Group, etc).
Demolishing Disk Utility or Airport Utility was bad, because of the limited possibility of a 3rd party replacement.
I know that iOS devs hated stuff like Core Data with a passion, but from where I'm sitting, iCloud has been so painless and trouble-free over the years that I have almost forgiven them their earlier attempts at services.
edit: see http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/480-disk-utility...
So in typical fashion a redesign with a more Apple centric feature set.
The pattern we've seen is Apple decides to re-write a utility because reasons. The new version comes out as part of a major OS release. Then nothing further happens.
The exceptions are the major apps like iTunes, Safari, iMovie, and iPhoto. Also the "discoveryd" re-write is extremely noteworthy in that it was fully withdrawn and replaced by its predecessor.
Whether this is wise is a different question.
But no you're right, there is a definite pattern of feature loss going back to iMovie HD 5. I'm still using Pages '09 because it does what I want and feels snappier.