I suspect that technical debt may be preventing Apple from doing what the author suggests. The iTunes code base must be enormous, developed using a polyglot of languages, libraries, frameworks, and Seldon only knows what else. The iTunes engineering team as currently constituted is probably not up to the task of both maintaining iTunes and writing a new set of apps from scratch.
How about just not using iTunes? The windows app is shit. There is no web app. The Android app is shit. I've just switched to Google play music everywhere. Don't know why people cling to something that's clearly crappy.
Shit compared to what, exactly? I've been hearing people gripe about how awful iTunes supposedly is for ages now, but it's always difficult to tell what they wish it would do (or not do) instead.
I started using iTunes in 2001 because it was a nice straightforward music library manager and player. Aside from the twenty minutes I spend grumbling after every upgrade, while I try to remember how to switch off all the extra stuff Apple has never convinced me to care about, it's still a nice straightforward music library manager and player.
Maybe all the new stuff is crap - I don't know, I don't use it - but the ancestral core of the product still works just fine.
It was quite good when it was released and did essentially one thing: managing your music library.
When it branched out to podcasts, movies, television shows, educational courses, app-management, mobile-in, and etc. is when quality tanked.
Perhaps I'm behind but last I checked iTunes was still encoding information such as the episode number as the "track number", reflecting it's musical roots.
