As much as you complain, it does make perfect sense to get rid of the 1/8th-inch plug (and I'm saying this as someone who uses it daily). Mostly because it's long and puts a lot of torque on the housing, and as a result, after a few years—if you use it a lot, like I do—it craps out, so you're left wiggling it around trying to find the "sweet spot" where you actually get a stereo signal. Yes, it's garbage.
(EDIT: But yes, it should be USB-C, not lightning...)
You spend a lot of time here bad talking the headphone jack, but your conclusions seem premature. There are a lot of devices out there with headphone jacks over many decades and what you describe doesn't sound like a technical failure, but rather contamination and it's often easily solved. Furthermore any port that is plugged and unplugged over long periods of time could develop an issue, even "Lightning" (just wait and see what happens with Lightning headphones as they become more common.)
You have to ask yourself, "Why is there a sweet spot?" Metal conducts all the way around that port and no amount of "using" the headphone jack will eliminate that metal. A "loose jack" would not create "sweet spots" either (the jack would move and maybe even come out, but until you break a wire it's going to keep producing sound. You didn't mention such a thing, so it has to either be corrosion of some kind of which the only possible sources are water (unlikely) or spark type corrosion (not going to happen in a headphone jack). Thus, I conclude there's some kind of "crap" in your jack that needs cleaned out. Try taking a flashlight and shine it into your headphone jack. You should be able to see debris in there if it's built up enough to interfere with your plug (I've had that happen with multiple iPods and in every case it wasn't the jack, but dust/lint building up inside the jack. Once removed with a toothpick or needle, the plug worked like new again). As I said, this can happen with any "female" port on a device. Macbooks aren't put into pockets, but that doesn't free them from dust and that can even build up by just plugging in a headphone and little bits accumulate.
The other possibility you can get with any plugged headphone is damage to the cord itself. THAT is where most of the torque stress is and wires can break in the cord. Always try another pair of headphones before assuming your jack is faulty even if it is clean.
Even so, it's not impossible a jack could get damaged over time, but given the frequency of plugging/unplugging on an iPod or even a Sony cassette Walkman (that jack has been used on SO many devices), it seems highly unlikely that a Macbook jack would get damaged even with "frequent use" when I've never had ANY device in my entire life have a headphone jack entirely fail for any reason other crap building up inside the jack that can be easily cleaned out.
Garbage? Hardly. I suspect the jack isn't the reason you're calling it garbage, but the user failing to maintain their equipment.
And besides, forcing it out of the computer will allow peripheral manufacturers to customize the DAC to their needs, which makes a lot of sense, from a design/product perspective. So, it's time to say goodbye. Get over it. I have to, and I'm sure, after about 90 minutes of moaning, I'll be just fine.
Customize the DAC to their needs????? What the frack are you talking about? Oh, that's right. You just revealed you don't know anything about DACs.
A Digital to Audio Converter or DAC has ONE function and that's to convert digital audio signals back to analog signals as accurately as possible. The only "customizing" you can do is to make a more accurate DAC (anything else is better handled with tone controls or a graphic equalizer or something). The problem with you assumption (and any "high-end" assumption) is that there's something wrong with current DAC designs. You're talking about a technology that has been absolutely PERFECTED over the first 15 years of digital audio (by the late 1990s) and is dirt cheap now for the best DACs of those years (their cost can easily be measured in pennies today). We're talking about accuracy to more than 0.1dB,a difference no human ear can detect. By comparison earphones and loudspeakers all have errors anywhere from 10-1000x or more greater and yet most humans continue to listen to GARBAGE EAR BUDS that come with iPhones and iPods).
Yes, they do sell "expensive" DACs out there, but anyone who buys one has been duped into believing in snake oil. Clean amplification is more important and the headphone/loudspeaker is FAR more important still in terms of potential for bad sound. But this idea that we'd be better off with DACs and amplifiers inside a headphone instead of the iPhone is ridiculous. Headphone makers don't make DACs. They just BUY them, the same as Apple. Put a good DAC and Op-Amp inside the iPhone and regardless of whether you use a 3.5mm jack or a Lightning or USB-C connector, the end result is identical. Put them in headphones and you need either a power connection or batteries and suddenly your headphones have to be larger than they need to be or may use junk to save literally a dollar (i.e. an iPhone costs over $700 and can better absorb a quality $10 DAC and Op-Amp combination cost than a headphone that typically wants to be as cheap as possible because people don't know about and don't care about quality. How many are going to buy $700 headphones? Not many. And for those few that would spend that kind of cash, the existing connectors can already output a digital signal for such use. Either way, it's not an argument to get rid of the 3.5mm jack when almost every headphone on the planet uses it and there's nothing wrong with it other than people failing to clean dust/lint out of it once in awhile.
