[pjc50]

Steam, like Caesar's Gaul and Half-Life, is divided into three parts.

There's the in-game section: overlay, matchmaking, DRM checking. This actually works very well because people hardly ever notice it. Starting a game with your friends nearly always works. Achievements work.

There's the thing you get if you click on "Steam". The store and library. This is pretty terrible, especially the store; everything is so slow because it's running in an embedded bad browser of some sort. "Big picture" mode seems to be OK, but I've not used it much.

Then there's the company and business model. Everyone else in this space has focused on using DRM to squeeze customers by preventing them from doing reasonable things. Steam is DRM with very reasonable portability, a backup feature, and (very important) regular big discounts. Without the Steam sales, people would still hate it.

[NTripleOne]

Okay, I can understand gripes with steam's chromium implementation, it can be pretty bad at times and is pretty outdated too - what would normally just cause an 'aw snap tab crash page' (for lack of a better term) in chrome normally causes the overlay to crash and reload entirely. As for the store website itself, that's supposedly getting a refresh 'soon' so any issues there may have a resolution on the horizon.

The library itself I can't really see any issues with, it's searchable, filterable, sortable (in the tabular view only) and can be categorised however you like. I wouldn't say it's slow or unresponsive either - if anything it's probably the snappiest part of the main client interface, which makes sense given it's also the only part of the main interface that isn't a browser pane.