Sorry, would "functionally inferior" be a more suitable name for it? I've come to expect robust and fully-featured WMs from years of using Windows and Linux, it's a bit funny to me that Apple has just given up in this respect.
Lack of cruft is a feature on Linux boxes, where people care about running a lean machine. My Mac is a slow, hulking trash box that runs Telegram and slurps bandwidth through a swizzle-straw. I frankly don't care about how little cruft my WM has when my system idles at 4 gigs of memory usage.
Apple needs a few things to make their WM competitive out of the box: 4/6 corner tiling would probably be a good place to start: split-screen is useless. Hopefully they would have an auto-tile functionality like Yabai, Pop Shell or i3-gaps, since I've come to expect that on my high-res devices too. They should also copy Microsoft's FancyZones, which let you quickly draft window presets to keep your screen divided the way you like it. Any of these would be welcome additions, because currently it feels like my Retina display is being put to waste with only two or three apps all fighting for attention.
They clearly don't need this stuff and they clearly are competitive already, given their market share with developers. I'd hate to see Apple cram in all these wacky features you're describing - I much prefer a simpler system.
