Enthusiastic users aren't the people you should design for - instead target changes that have the greatest positive impact for the most users. There could have been a compelling reason like color requirements for accessibility or how they display on low end screens for NBU that negates a bunch of memegen posts about how pretty it looks.
I notice that maps.bing.com doesn't have the same problem. I guess it's time to test drive it for a couple weeks.
that seems especially unlikely. the problem is inability to differentiate between things, most accessibility issues in maps are inability to differentiate. Changes that make it harder to differentiate will not improve accessibility.
They are the people you design for at the beginning to get traction, and once you got the mainstream on board because of their evangelicalism, you switch targets.
Aka, the enthusiastic people get used first and then dumped.
so it can't be all Apple's fault.
But if you count streetview car drivers trying to drive every street in the entire world every few years, people manually moderating crowdsourced contributions, people updating the map for all new construction worldwide, people working to maintain business listings for every business with a physical location (including those without much web presence), people dealing with adversaries who want to list their fake '24 hour emergency locksmith' all over every city, people parsing train and bus timetables in every city worldwide no matter how awful their websites are, an advertising sales team specifically targeting smaller businesses who are interested in local advertising...
The Navteq acquisition is what prompted Google to create their own maps. They were licensing Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) and Navteq maps before that. Apple made the same move a few years later. I think Steve Jobs was still around. I bet Apple has a few thousand people working on this topic as well.
That's just what it takes to build and maintain a world map and assorted geospatial technologies, datasets, etc.
In the end it’s so subjective that not everyone will be happy.