Thoughts about the transitions from Snow Leopard to Lion then Mountain Lion
Why was Lion considered so bad?
A good question.
I wonder whether the reflective (post-'Lion era') comments about the badness of Lion era are representative of majority opinion. Please note, this is not to devalue minority opinion (Lion aside: some of my views place me in a tiny minority); it's just food for thought.
If I put myself in the shoes of others
I suspect that some of the kickback originated with the novel method of distribution. An understandably negative reaction, to failed or interrupted download of a large file, may be over-amplified when it's realised that any number of people suffer what
appears to be the same problem. (Modern approaches to App Store are much more user-friendly; it may be easy to forget that the electronic-only approach to distribution of Apple software was in its infancy in the late Snow Leopard era. I don't recall exact details but it's likely that the app did not present plain english messages when errors occurred, and so on. In the absence of plain english and technical knowledge, there's a massive "me too" effect when in truth, there are a variety of problems, none of which is massive.)
One step beyond distribution and download, still in the shoes of others
Lion was probably my first realisation of an
extraordinary difference between (a) pre-release installation experiences and (b) installation experiences in the real world. In reality it seemed to me that many of the installation failures, or problems immediately subsequent to installation, were without reasonable explanation. From my point of view (not entirely without bias) the likeliest explanation for a significant proportion of the unreasonable/inexplicable incidents was the file system constraint. No system-integrated ability to check the integrity of media, and so a 'disk' (more accurately, a volume) that was
apparently OK might have been
truly in a marginal or bad state. And so a significant amount of writing to a marginal disk might lead to noticeable problems, and so there's misinterpretation that the installer app itself is the cause and so on. It was probably around this time that I began pushing for a more capable file/storage system
enough said (this paragraph could go
way off-topic).
My key point from those two paragraphs: more than the usual amount of noise about App Store, plus more than the usual amount about installation. The sum of those two masses was simplistically misconstrued as carelessness by Apple in its preparations for Lion. All that noise, amplified
and the many good things that are later discovered do not necessarily allow the customer to shake that feeling of negativity.
Personally
One thing was outstanding:
change for the sake of change. I found this in only one area, and I suspect that not many customers were affected by the regression, but the regression was extremely troublesome to those affected.
That one change for the sake of change was the aqua popover, in lieu of a sidebar, in iCal.
I had no objection to the use of popovers, but Apple had
removed a critical part of the interface; it was almost insanely difficult to work within the constraints of
that popover alone.
The customer was denied the choice.
From Lion, to Mountain Lion
Mountain Lion should be off-topic, but it's worth noting that Apple's reintroduction of the sidebar, to Calendar, did not undo the subtle damage that had been caused by Lion's removal of the sidebar.
I'm not ungrateful for the reintroduction. Just, honestly, that year or so of deprivation by Apple effectively killed my enthusiasm to use (and to test) the calendaring side of Apple's software.
A little research
I spent a few hours putting together
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=19602911#post19602911 it was remarkable then, it's remarkable now, that I could find only one thing worth listing that was Lion-oriented:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1204565/
