It's cumbersome, a memory and storage space hog, it's slow, the output quality is audibly worse than any other player, it always tries to link me to websites I'm not interested in, it doesn't play well with other software.....
....should I go on?
What Web sites? I will attribute the rest to you likely being on Windows as my experience on my Mac is totally different, but I have never been linked to a Web site.
And still, worse than IE 6?
No, allow me to go on. Why in the world does an "update" to iTunes require an 85 MB download? Why does Quicktime try to force it's way to being the default player for all media types after every iTunes update?
You said — It’s cumbersome, a memory and storage space hog, it’s slow, the output quality is audibly worse than any other player, it always tries to link me to websites I’m not interested in, it doesn’t play well with other software.....
—
I’ve used this software before it ever came to Apple and it wasn’t cumbersome then and I can’t see that it’s become cumbersome now. That’s a real puzzle to me... :-)
And storage space hog... LOL..., that’s a big laugh. I have to laugh at that, because my biggest problem with storage space is basically storage for all the songs and audio books and movies and TV shows that I want to have access to. The iTunes software is so insignificant to my library of material that it’s sort of funny for me to even consider or give a second thought to software space. I’m trying to sort out space for my library of materials... :-)
And linking to websites is sort of weird, since I’ve never had the software link me once to any website. Now, that’s really strange. I can’t figure out why it never happens to me and it happens to you...