I use the Mini every day, but only via a tty window.
And it shows.
He had bad ideas too but was much better at holding the line on good UI (unless the bad idea was his). We haven’t had that in a long time.
They made certain design decisions a long time ago around a lot of things and that's one of them.
They 'conscientiously' designed the UX - which is great - it generally makes it better, but the problem is, when you make a mistake, the mistake is more ingrained.
We all know of 'Arrogant Engineers' thinking their 'Algorithm is more important than anything' - that 'save' thing is a design conceit, heavily instituted into the culture. The designers would look at you like an infidel for suggesting you know something they don't back in the day. Or even today.
I'm basically certain that Jobs himself will have defended that feature 1000 times over the years.
It's probably kept up like a religious ritual, a point of 'differentiation' and 'we're better here'.
Which is very different than a lack of operational rigour, it's where part of the system is overbearing.
"It's just the way we do it here" will be the justification for the next 100 years on that. And changing things that are ingrained is also very heard and risky. It's like changing the constitution, it's pulling a thread on the sweater.
There are quite a lot of weird 'Apple Way' things, most good, many bad.
File > Save doesn't make sense because you would be saving your iMovie project. You're trying to export the final video from the project, not save it.
The problem was using a far too complex tool to do a simple job (and not understanding how the tool works). You can trim a video in Quicktime or Photos which directly manipulates the file.
"Export" means "save this working file in one of many formats, including possibly other formats that are first-class in third-party apps but not this app"
you try to justify it in a logical way, but you fail to realize that this is inherently subjective