Not really that hard of a problem to solve. Just require that the credit card, name, address, etc on both accounts match and do two step verification logins for both. It's doable, especially for a company like Apple. The only issue is that they don't really have much motivation to actually do it.
It seems a reasonably secure approach, but they're still likely to err on the side of caution. This can really only address one particular type of account merger - a single individual consolidating accounts. It doesn't directly address those "other" mergers - individuals who want to pool their iTunes purchases, and account take-overs (and account take-overs include the nastiness that can occur during break-ups and divorces).
In both those cases, the individuals could game the system by changing the name and payment info on one of the accounts, and enable two-step verification... those steps are entirely in the account-holder's control (and it's not uncommon for significant others/spouses to have each other's passwords). Apple could counter fraudulent takeovers by blocking mergers where the account owner's name and/or credit card had been changed for a certain amount of time, but they couldn't ban those changes indefinitely - a "legitimate" merger could also require making those changes ("Change your last name to your married name, wait a month, and then you can merge.")
Altogether, yeah, it's possible, but "Just say no" is a whole lot simpler and safer for Apple. Since it's un-doable, Family Sharing is still the better solution when multiple individuals are involved - why give those individuals an option (putting the husband's name on both accounts) that can potentially lead to other problems down the road?
Yes, my account is an icloud.com email address. I don't want my contacts on my iTunes account. I really hate how they made the addresses automatically an account instead allowing you to connect it to an already existing iTunes account upon creation.
There are actually two ways to get an iCloud.com address - create an all-new account as you did, or add the iCloud.com address as an alias to an existing, non-Apple-email account. Back when iCloud was introduced, I think a lot of people thought they needed to create an iCloud.com email address to use iCloud (I did). I think Apple could have done a much better job of communicating. In my case, I realized the problem quickly, and simply abandoned the iCloud.com email address/account. I never shared that iCloud.com email address with others, never used it for setting up accounts with other services, etc. But once you make an email account "yours" - yeah, undoing it is a real mess.
Exactly. It's a work around. Instead of actually taking the time to really help fix the issue Apple just provided an entirely different feature that could be used as a workaround.
The primary issues addressed by Family Sharing are much bigger for Apple than those posed by individuals with your particular desire, I'm not sure your particular need was even an
afterthought when they developed Family Sharing.
Originally, Apple encouraged families to share iTunes accounts. It was simply administratively for Apple, and it made folks happy (no need to buy the same item multiple times). When iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime came along, Apple was slow to realize that families sharing a single account for accounts containing "personal" content was... sub-optimal. 5GB of free storage space for four or more users' backups? Spouses seeing each other's text messages? Kids deleting their parents contacts? Still, for a long time after iCloud was introduced, Apple support documents still encouraged families to use a single account for the entire family, for all services. Ultimately, the "right" solution is a separate Apple ID for every individual, and Family Sharing addresses some of the problems created by that change.
