I think I might be the only person on HN who actually luv- luv- luvs iTunes, and I say this as someone who once wrote his own MP3 player interface out of extreme music-player-fussiness. The "kruft" ship sailed the minute I downloaded Firefox.
For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.