I suspect you're guilty of that which you accuse in your second sentence above. By no means does Apple consistently, flawlessly understand the needs of their customers and deliver products to meet them. With Compressor, for instance, Apple has a history of attempting both a "simple, basic compression tool" and the "best of breed" simultaneously. Philip Hodgetts, whom it would be difficult to accuse of not paying attention to Apple, has certainly had words with the application's developers on this topic.

Also, as Apple doesn't offer beta versions of their software for testing, it's not uncommon for significant bugs to make it into shipping versions. DVD Studio Pro featured a bug that generated still menus with incorrect field ordering. If I recall correctly, it took Apple more than a year to release an update that squashed the bug.

In the consumer space, iMovie '08 was so universally reviled that Apple made the previous version available for download so users could downgrade.