As if it's a popular browser or anything, the days of MS imposing stupid browser rules is over.

Someone forgot to tell NVidia that Eth mining is not going to prop up ridiculous prices for video cards. May be a good time to short Nvidia, it will be a bloodbath of a quarter.

What if they get a job at stack overflow?

Agile programming and how it is used is a big part of the blame. The constant need for more features every sprint. It takes a serious effort to get a sprint to cleanup and remove dead code and optimize. One has to file a bug to get some of that done and even then, if not justified it will just get added to the back-burner and eventually closed due to age. This has been happening for decades.

While agile is mostly better than waterfall, the problem falls on people running it and their inability to schedule code-wellness time in sprints. When success is rated by how many features were added, it's all additive to the management types. Developers need to push back during sprint planning and demand time to cleanup and update the codebase.

They probably started working on it last year and by the time it was ready to launch the marketplace was crashing and burning.

Money laundering, alive and well...

This is a process issue, developers should never be able to deploy.

They push to the repo on github/gitlab/etc and let a continuous integration system (jenkins/etc) do unit tests/integration tests/acceptance tests/verification and then deployment only allowed for some users and after proper approval. Having local changes will mean nothing if they are not pushed, this is the purpose of distributed nature of git. This is how you prevent foolish mistakes.

Have a screaming device that does not show ads (like Nvidia Shield or similar).

Spotify will fail unless they make their UI more than a simple streamer for podcasts. They don't have the capacity to stream video+audio and JRE (joe rogan exp) has been glitchy and sometimes unwatchable (there is no way to turn off video at this time). There is no ability to catchup on a podcast (or bulk mark them already played). The ordering on the app is newest to oldest (sorting the other way makes the UI upside down, next should be the newer). On and on, the usability features are just not there yet and any semi-decent RSS player is more than adequate.

To suggest they are going to charge for it when they have done almost nothing to make it comparable to existing podcast app is a joke.

I use spotify for music and mostly it's ok, but the app on android, windows and browser struggles with video. The JRE mess is causing me to look at amazon and google for music.

There is no way to stop video when bandwidth is limited, most of the time I am not watching a podcast I am listening to it while working/walking/etc
There is no way to "mark all played" on windows client (useful when subscribing to a podcast for the first time)
Next podcast is not chronological but instead jump to the older one that was already played, so have to manually start them
Resume playing fails most of the time and starts from beginning
Very jittery during playback, RSS clients pre-download the files while spotify tries to stream, you have to manually download it (not missing just tedious to use)

I have premium subscription and like it for music but their functionality with podcasts is so bad that I am not listening to JRE anymore and sticking to the reliable and functional RSS based podcast clients.

Coding is more art than science, which is why there are more than 1 paths to a given problem and seldom is there an optimal path to solve it. It also explains the 10x gap in programmer skill, art has a very similar pattern, you have great artists and you have people claiming to be artists and a huge gap in-between. A true artist can always spot another true artist; just like a 10x developer can spot another one during an interview (which is why not everyone is qualified to hire developers, but this is another tangent). Lots of great developers also seem to have great interest in music and other arts, it's just fits the thought pattern and creativity.

Yeah, it's more an art than science.

How do we know it wasn't a weaponized asteroid intended to clearing and terraforming this planet for the new human species to evolve and be monitored?

Aimp is the closest I found (http://www.aimp.ru/)
Fubar2000 not as refined as Aimp but seems to be more extensible (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foobar2000.org%2F)

Why pick, I run both.

It benefits Amazon if someone price checks and orders from them, I suspect this patent is to prevent some retailer from getting such patent which can be used against Amazon. I suspect this is preemptive self-protection patent, but who knows.