TF1 was pretty rough to use, but beat the pants off Theano for usability, which was really the best thing going before it. Sure it was slow as dirt ("tensorslow") even though the awkward design was justified on being able to make it fast. But it was by far the best thing going for a long time.

Google really killed TF with the transition to TF2. Backwards incompatible everything? This only makes sense if you live in a giant monorepo with tools that rewrite everybody's code whenever you change an interface. (e.g. inside google). On the outside it took TF's biggest asset and turned it into a liability. Every library, blog post, stackoverflow post, etc talking about TF was now wrong. So anybody trying to figure out how to get started or build something was forced into confusion. Not sure about this, but I suspect it's Chollet's fault.