I understand your frustration. Qubes requires effort, perhaps too much effort to learn, to implement a usable version for; Journalists. Human Rights Defenders. Businessman. Even someone who needs to protect their personal money, lifestyle from the “Barbarians at the Gate.” And then anyone who wants a bit of peace and quiet while using the internet, as opposed to being bombarded with targeted advertising from “Surveillance Capitalism.”
Reality is, When we post on the internet, things sound sharper and more abrasive than we intended. I have to chill sometimes.
Qubes is not like a polished OS. Even other OS’s, like Fedora, PopOS, and a long list are not fully polished. Qubes OS, difficulties, does not have an Apple Care, or a Dell Support to help when those go sideways or backwards or just hang.
Qubes Developers stitched together Xen, with some basic OS. Then have to make decisions, will this doing this or that make Qubes less than Secure. I personally want to add a bunch of ‘third party’ programs, programs that most OS’s make easy to install. I know that each time I add "third party’ software, I make my Qubes less secure. I increase the “Attack Surface.” Yes even if I am adding programs to communicate with encryption. These programs are needed to make Qubes more usable.
I suspect. That the developers, the next point they consider in what they do, is; Is this change part of what they (Qubes Developers) can control, continue to control.
Such as: If they felt they should change, improve Firefox by, - starting it with a different DNS, Search Engine, a few security designed extensions. Then every time there is an update to Firefox,or the OS it is in (now Debian or Fedora), or Qubes itself. several people would need to spend hours and hours testing those changes to make sure the security is not reduced in some ways. Plus, someone must answer questions about the different performance of the Firefox they changed. When now there are forums for the standard Firefox, Fedora or Debian implementations of Firefox now.
When I find myself irritated by some limitation, that I run into. I step back think awhile, and realize the limitation was keep this Qubes --Secure (Security is a very big deal for me) or to preserve my personal choice in how to use Qubes. Usually I am impressed with, that was a brilliant decision to make it that way.
I think we are closer to having a polished version of Qubes, even if it is one people like me make less secure with adding ‘third party’ programs, than we realize. Likely the upcoming documentation of the 4.2 Final will clarify the things, my limited experience, tech knowledge did not know how to implement. A few things might need to be fixed.
Then as others share their implementations of certain, modified Qubes, Qubes will have the polish you desire. That I desire.
Please try not to take the direct replies of all on this thread to be more angry, than people who mostly volunteer their time want to get on with what they are doing. (sorry if I am again speaking out of place, I used to be a programmer, and was not always easy to talk with)