Amen. I loved ("the old") Apple for that complete, easy-to-use ecosystem that (mostly) made sense: you bought a MacBook Air or Pro and the Apple Thunderbolt Display and got a great display + docking station in one package. It was expensive, but if I'd bought a low/mid range Eizo + dock it would'd cost the same, but it would suck aesthetically and functionally
The same with the Airports. I'm not a novice, but I'm also not an expert — the router configurations were always a pain the ass. I remember wasting hours to make my ISP's router play nice with my various devices: PC, Mac, iPhone etc. Going to the configuration page and setting it up was inconvenient for me, but when I had to explain it to my mother over the phone (because of course her router had a completely different config page, where the same functionalities where named differently) it was just faster driving to her and doing it myself.
So when I went all Apple in my household I bought the 2GB Time Capsule (the 4th gen) and it's been working perfectly backing up 2 Macs with a 4GB Seagate plugged in as a media server. When I moved to a bigger apartment last year I wasn't getting satisfactory transfers across the whole apartment (in my nerdy opinion, not my wife's
. The ISP had put the cable in the far corner room and I couldn't remodel the apartment with internet cables in mind, so I was facing a nerd's dilemma: should I buy an Airport Express to extend my WiFI or get a mesh system? I weighed my options and decided I didn't want to give up my current configuration, because... it just works. But furthermore, what each one of those mesh systems lacked were: ports! I need at least 3 ports on the main router (1 for TB display and 2 for smart thingy hubs) and I need an Ethernet port on a "satellite"/beacon to connect my hi-fi system. And AP Express was the best option: it's small, it gives me great WiFI coverage and I can plug in my Denon hi-fi, so I can get AirPlay (sidenote: Denon updated its firmware recently and Airplay started to suck: fortunately I could use an optical audio cable to connect the Airport to it and use it as a back up wireless music connection).
Maybe this extended WiFi isn't as awesome as a mesh system; don't know, since I haven't tried mesh. But I can say it's been really solid with maybe 1 restart per 6 months or so. I was afraid of my devices "switching" between Airports, but it's not an issue.
Enough said, I think it's a shame that Apple drops the Airport line. I really think it was great and could've been greater: had they combined AirPod with Airport and made their own mesh system (make an Airport Express + a speaker, like an Echo router). I think it would've swayed a lot of people into buying a "smart speaker" if it had another, more practical function like delivering WiFi. But I don't know, maybe that's just me. Whenever I travel or visit other people, they have their routers/modems hidden away somewhere with a WiFi name and password they can't remember, because the devices are ugly, plastic thingies with antennas sticking out and a billion LEDs and there's no easy way to set it up. I'm now in Portugal and although one of the DSL providers (NOS) has a nice looking router, the connection sucks: it it just disappears at the far end of a 60 sq. meter apartment, it drops the connection constantly or giving me a message, that another device is using my IP address. Fortunately I know what do, but if it was my wife or most of my friends, they would lose hours connecting and reconnecting, turning their WiFI on and off and so on. And that was the beauty of AirPort: it just worked. Just like the Thunderbolt Display.
