I don't know what it is that makes Microsoft so inelegant. Not only what you've said, but their APIs / programming environment in general is ugly and (I presume) unwieldy. Their apps (I just switched to Excel / OneNote / etc. from Google) have bugs that don't exist with competitors. The other day I couldn't use OneNote because my Internet went down (?!). Same for Excel, it doesn't reload immediately upon reconnect like Google Sheets did.

I don't get Microsoft. They're huge. They hire a lot of people. Their products are kludges.