Most of those twenty years were spent doing my own things in Linux, Perl, and R. In glorious ivory tower isolation from the real world consequences of serving a master who's goal was to extract revenue...
Here I am for the last year serving Apple (the Beast from Cupertino?).
The problems are the same with documentation. Yesterday I found an example in some Apple documentation. It saved me half a day, and I almost dies from shock. I have never before seen an actual example...
Their main documentation is videos. Fucking videos. Videos of what looks like actors pretending to be developers, that go on for ages, have no transcripts....
And then the tools: At least the MS and Oracle tools work! (Do they?) In Apple you cannot believe what the debugger tells you about the state of your programme with out double checking in at least two other ways, because their tool chain is very buggy, and they will not fix it.
There is no money in fixing tools. We developers pay them SFA money, brighter colours on the App store, deeper dark arts in getting you to fork over $XX for shiny apps that is where their development resources are going.
SO... They are all the same: APple, MS, Oracle, Google.... We developers are their bitches, we will crawl over broken glass to get things done, so there is no need to spend any resources on us....
Come back RMS!! All is forgiven!!!