Apple rarely places importance on such things. Heaven forbid we have a customizable user experience. You'd think that after a decade of iOS, it would be ironed out by now.
This is actually regressive behavior, I don't recall these problems from the previous iOS (7?)
After umpteen tries, I figured out the dock issue. Apparently, the iPhone dock will accept four icons, no more. So I moved Mail off the dock, since I don't use it on my iPhone, then I could move Camera down there, which I do use.
Now no one would expect the iPhone dock to hold 20 icons, but it seems to me it could hold 5 or 6 with little loss in usability. And by the way, I looked up rearranging icon apps in both apple's guide and several other sources. No one mentioned this crucial detail about the dock. And you can't rearrange the dock in iTunes as far as I could tell, it can only be done on the iPhone.
As for the syncing issue, after three runs at rearranging all my apps, iTunes finally decided I meant it, and left them where I wanted them.
The first mac I used was the fat mac, and I remember being confused as all heck, because I had learned computer driving on an ibm pc. It was "well, how do I...?" "you just do..." because I was expecting to have to do half the computer's thinking for it. But once it sank in, I never looked back. But it seems to me that these days, apple is going in the opposite direction. You really can have too many bells and whistles, and I think we're getting there.
