As someone who owns dozens of devices with both USB-C and Lightning ports, I find the Lightning port to be significantly superior to USB-C. It is much easier to plug in due to the curves on the sides, easier to plug out, holds in place more strongly, and the port lasts much longer. Why do you call it “godawful”?
The single factor that makes it awful is that no one else uses it aside from Apple, so I have to have multiple cords of two different types around the house. Annoying!
The port actually does support USB 3. If you look in an iPhones Lightning port you'll see that only one side of the port actually has contacts and that's why it's USB 2 only. Some Lightning iPads support USB 3 and they have contacts on both sides of the port.
At least they would improve the sync - why all my photos have to go to cloud first? The device is right here. Cherry picking and sending via airdrop doesn’t scale well.
Its a horrible thing to have to manage USB for everything and yet another cable just for apple devices. I have met actually 0 people who appreciate this on Apple, everybody hates it with passion and during usual office day there is always somebody hunting for iphone cable to charge his phone.
For me, this was the reason which swayed me for Samsung galaxy S22 Ultra instead of iphone 13 pro max. Plus that fugly-as-hell notch, I mean phones look like cheap chinese phones from 2015 with it. Literally everybody on the market has figured a better way to do this.
As with other Apple products (hi AirPods Max) Lightning works fine and well until you take it anywhere the humidity is above 80% for extended periods of time.
I have more Lightning cables with pin 5 (Vcc) charred than I'd like to admit. At one point in my life it took about 2 weeks per side of the connector until they became unusable.
That's a build-quality issue; I have zero doubt that if Apple put effort into it they could design a USB-C port and USB-C cable that was waterproof and robust to their standards.