I've had the chip struggle like once in my life. That was on a card very near it's expiration date. Most people I see in the store have no problems with their payment method, and when I was a cashier in 2012, people seemed to have significantly more problems getting their magstripes to scan.

All of this is SUPER dependent on which flavor/brand of POS is popular around you, the effort your bank put into making a good implementation, and whether your local merchants actually put effort into running their business and keeping equipment maintained. Pretty much nothing in this discussion is generalizeable to all of the US other than "We were late to the party of chip cards"

I don't think I am. All I do is take it out of my wallet, put in the reader, take it out, put it back in my wallet, lather, rinse, repeat.

or your local merchants use "special" terminals

That would make sense if we were talking about one merchant, or even just two. But I can go to Barnes & Noble, Lowes, Food Lion, the local corner gas station, Ace Hardware, it doesn't matter, I routinely find the chip readers less reliable than the magstripe reader. I can't explain it, but chips are tainted in my worldview at this point.

Of course I can. But that means I have to stop and take time out of my day to call my bank and dick around with them. And then if the new card comes with a new number (I don't know if it will or not), and/or expiration date (that almost certainly will change), then I have to login to EVERY SINGLE ONE of the places online where I use that card for some kind of automatic payment and change the payment details. I'm extremely loathe to do that, because it's incredibly tedious and painful, and I always miss one anyway and wind up getting scary emails about how my account is about to be closed.

Sure, my hand will probably be forced on this sooner or later. But as it stands, I just haven't cared enough to deal with all of that.

I really haven't heard of much trouble caused by these systems - of course, they require magnetic stripes in general, which are a massive attack vector, but the bar use case specifically doesn't seem to cause additional issues that I'm aware of. There are so many lower-tech and easy ways to steal magnetic track data, like skimmers, that I don't think compromising bar-back point of sale systems is a particularly high priority for most criminals.

Anyway, this is probably just a small snapshot in time regardless, since once swiped-card transactions finally go away US bars will have to switch to the mobile terminal pay-as-you-go method anyway.

You mean payments between banks that take two to three days within the country instead of a regulated maximum of 15 seconds across borders?

It's a shame you're so salty that the rest of the world has far overtaken the US. You may have been doing it "longer", but you've absolutely failed to iterate and are still stuck with obsolete technology that's rife with fraud, for which a more appropriate feeling than saltiness is shame.