I'm happy to pay the $15/month just to have the capability to have stuff shipped to my door overnight for free. There are months where I don't order anything at all. Compared to rent or food it's a drop in the bucket.
I'm genuinely confused by your take here.
That being said it's been a while since I did the signup flow, maybe it's gotten way worse, do you have an example?
With prime I have to manually select the shipping speed to get it the fastest.
Without prime, it defaults to faster shipping that you pay for. You have to manually select slower shipping to get the advertised "free super-saver shipping"