When engineers see 5 different physical ports, they want to consolidate, because there's no good reason for them to be different, and there are real benefits to be gained by having them all the same.
Only certain engineers. Don't group the ones who love gratuitous complexity and "value engineering" with those who think complex standards like USB-C are a horrible idea and would rather have separate and simple interfaces.
There's a reason RS-232/485 (along with good old D connectors) are still extremely prevalent in non-consumer equipment.
I think that's a very developer-heavy perspective. As a user who doesn't know anything about hardware communication standards (lucky me, perhaps?) I think the fewer connector types there are, the better.
With a single USB OTG cable I can connect almost any peripheral to my phone, including my XBox 360 controller and my endoscopic camera. Why not a monitor as well? Why do they have all these other weird non-USB connectors like HDMI and DVI? I'm sure there's a good answer from a developer's perspective but from a user perspective or makes perfect sense for there to be a single connector to rule them all.
Edit: another example is that sometimes I connect more than one mouse or keyboard to a single computer. Imagine if there were still dedicated ports for each type of peripheral – would I need to buy a special motherboard with two mice slots? Or a mouse port expansion card? What a nightmare.
Completely interchangeable cords for everything is an excellent goal that everyone agrees would be a beautiful thing. That idea/direction is not what we're criticizing. It's the implementation that we're criticizing. In particular, the implementation that still requires separate cords for separate tasks (because each USB-C cable supports an unknown subset of the capabilities) but removes the labels and visual / physical cues that you could use to identify which tasks it supports. Not only does this fail to achieve the dream, it fails to even live up to the previous generation.
Eventually we'll reach the dream and it will be great, but there was no need to jump in the pit of spikes on our way there. It wasn't blocking the road, it wasn't camouflaged, it was out there in the open, and the USB-C guys decided it would be fun to jump in. Why?
And to think that USB was designed to kill Firewire and require a PC-in-loop because Intel was scared of peripherals that could talk to each other w/o an intermediary!
Now we have those smart peripherals and 20x the complexity. Thanks Intel. And thanks Apple for making Firewire too expensive.
In my alternate universe my home AV equipment networks with GPIB and 1Ge PoE with SCTP.
Only certain engineers. Don't group the ones who love gratuitous complexity and "value engineering" with those who think complex standards like USB-C are a horrible idea and would rather have separate and simple interfaces.
There's a reason RS-232/485 (along with good old D connectors) are still extremely prevalent in non-consumer equipment.