> Something tells me the usual critics still won't be satisfied, but these are both a big deal and tell a story about listening to the improvements that were desired by users.

Critic here. apt is still handicapped and snap is still being pushed down users' throats for profit. Improvement of undesired change resulting in less user control than the state before undesired change is an act of pulling the wool over people's eyes. snap is an unfriendly garbage with which you never know if you should use `--classic` without trial and error. Doing small fixes to this garbage doesn't fix the fiasco that handicapping apt to push snap was.