When wifi first came out it was slower than Ethernet but it had enough advantages that people started using it anyways. That's how technology advances. The more people who use it the more it will improve over the next few years. Already I can't notice a difference in audio quality between Bluetooth and wired headphones.
I'm sure you would agree that a 1080p HD digital TV picture is far better than a CRT SD analogue TV picture. However, whenever I go into my mom's house, she's got her 40" flat screen tuned to an SD station, with the widescreen stretch function turned on. There's nothing better about that picture than what she used to get on her 19" CRT. The only advantage in that situation is that her TV is larger but takes up much less room than her old one. I fix it every time I'm there, but she's reverted it by my next visit -- she doesn't like the black bars on the sides and top.
The point is, BT is not yet up to 1080p HD broadcasts, it's still putting out SD. The 3.5mm Jack in contrast is putting out 4K video, continuing the analogy. just because you don't personally hear the difference is no different than my mom watching a stretched SD broadcast and not seeing the difference. The disparity exists.
Going off your analogy, when I got my first HDTV there were no HD channels available from my provider, BluRay had not been released yet and everything was simply stretched. That didn't stop me and many others from buying them. Within a few years of HDTV's becoming more affordable and more widely used the content followed and now it has become the standard. The same is happening with 4K right now (technology is out there but most content is just stretched).
Bluetooth will continue to improve and the gap in quality will close. In the meantime everyone who is able to hear a difference is free to use the included adapter.
I agree. In fact I have made the exact same analogy -- it took the federal government to shut off analogue broadcasts before consumers started switching to digital TV equipment, just as it took Apple removing the headphone jack to start the drive toward digital audio equipment; even though there were plenty of HD channels and content readily available over the free airwaves, if not individual cable and satellite providers, just as there were Lightning and BT options already on the market for years.
But that's a different analogy than I'm making. There is plenty of high quality audio content available everywhere. Most people are listening to 320 AAC or equivalent sound files, which is as a close to CD quality as most people need. Going back to my analogy, BT is currently at the SD end of the spectrum in terms of reproducing those sound files. It's the equivalent of putting an digital converter on your old CRT after the transition -- all of the HD digital content is available, you're just still viewing it in analogue SD, with the same drawbacks. 720p, 1080p, 4K are all shades of what's currently available with wired tech (3.5mm or Lightning), whether from an Mp3 or directly from a CD. So if 3.5mm/Lightning is an HD TV set, BT is an SD set. Content is the same. In this analogy, in terms of quality, after the government turned off the analogue signal, buying a BT headphone is as if a consumer went out and bought a new analogue flat screen TV with a digital converter box -- they're getting none of the benefits of the quality improvements of digital HD, despite getting the convenience of a flat screen (similar to the convenience of wireless mobility), but it's worse, because currently BT customers are paying the 4K TV price.
As for 3.5mm vs. Lightning, I'd say the difference is more like 1080p vs. 4K. Lightning will potentially enable higher quality sound reproduction over what the 6s 3.5mm offers, by putting a higher grade DAC and amp into the headphones, which are better paired to the equipment's audio characteristics, with the added benefit that the headphones will always sound the same as long as they are plugged into a digital source; whereas they will sound different on every analogue source they're connected to, since they are colored by the amp and/or DAC used in the equipment. If we dump wired audio into the same digital TV analogy, I'd say yours applies more to this -- the government turned off the analogue signal, and went digital. The reason Apple has dropped the ball here is that while you still have the option to plug a wire into Lightning, it would be like buying a new digital TV that wasn't compatible with any of your old analogue equipment, and no one made an adapter for it. So you wouldn't be able to plug your new digital HD TV set into the RCA, or Coax outputs from a VCR, or DVD player, or video game, just like you can't plug your new Lightning headphones into a 3.5mm jack, or a USB-C port of a MacBook, et al, for instance. While I suspect someone will eventually make an adapter for that, can you imagine how dumb it would have been if a customer bought a new HD TV set after the government shut off the analogue signal, and they couldn't plug in any existing DVD players, and no one made a way to plug them into the sets, and there were no compatible DVD players on the market yet? So the only way to get content into the new TVs would be from over the air digital broadcasts (Lightning)? The digital revolution would have ground to a halt. But that didn't happen as digital TV makers included every port a person could possibly need in their sets to connect with whatever current products were being sold on the market (nor did they make the customer buy a bunch of dongles to use them, which is another issue separate from this).
And those are the two options we currently have. Apple has given us a low quality audio option, with the freedom of wireless, or a high quality wired option that can't be used with anything else. There is a third option, but it essentially puts the customer right back where they started with the inconvenience of additional things to purchase and carry to access the same content exactly as they did before. Apple has sold you a digital TV signal, but only allow you to access the highest quality over the air with your new HDTV set (Lightning on a newer iOS device), or lower quality with an expensive new SD TV set (BT), or the same quality offered before, via a limited function digital converter box (3.5mm adapter). Since Apple gives away the adapter for free, there's nothing encouraging anyone to adopt either BT or Lightning, except the improved convenience of BT (as far as we know), and native compatibility of Lightning. Anyone who needs greater quality, compatibility and/or functionality than what's available is going to opt for using their old equipment with the adapter.
So while I agree with you 100%, that wireless is the future and we have some growing pains, just as we did through the digital TV transition, and USB, et al, Apple has done nothing to actually encourage this transition. They've taken away the headphone port, but haven't offered any real improvements, and in fact have taken away functionality. And that's why they've botched this whole thing.
