I agree with most of the sentiment here. Apple has made such a mess with all of their digital library/AppleTV/home sharing stuff. They have such *potential*. But every aspect of it needs a lot of work, but honestly the work doesn't seem so bad.
AppleTV: Fix the menus, as described in this thread. The home-sharing sucks, and interfaces like Plex, etc, give much better interfaces. As mentioned, just let us "scroll left or right" to see grid views, etc. And why the hell can't we have Apps yet? The *home* screen menu, while not beautiful, is laid out in a way that would be fine for apps. Each app gets a little tv screen icon. Cool, just run with it and let TBS, ABC, NBC, TNT, HBO, CineMax, etc, put their damn apps there!
iPad/iPhone: Oh my god, fix home sharing. It's absolutely broken. There are 5,000 threads on the internet of people trying everything possible to get their TV shows to list properly, and all the molestation of the different metadata fields they have to do, and there is no single solution. And Movies are broken too. How can that be difficult? Just IGNORE all the Artist fields from music, and ONLY use the TV show fields. If it's a TV show, why are you even acknowledging the artist fields? SIGH. I can't believe this is so broken! It's simply unuseable.
--
/rant
By the way, file bug reports for these things:
https://bugreport.apple.com