yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience.

It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.