I've tried it too, and it has some things I like, like the AI stuff seems pretty good compared to other solutions I've seen.
But all these tools suffer I think from being too opinionated. Like I get why they do that, and to some extent that's the right approach, but you need to add enough configuration options so that you don't end up with one thing that's a deal breaker.
For me it's conversation view. Emails don't come in conversations, it's totally outside the protocol and not supported within the information available (all such "threads" are by definition a guess as to what's happening) and I don't understand how any power user puts up with it.
Am I really the only one who has threads with the same subject line that branch into private conversations between specific people and/or change topic a few times?
How can an email client claim to be serious if it can't literally just show me list of the fucking emails I have received in the order I received them. Like how can this still be a thing?
And why can't I always just sort by attribute, like an XL sheet, sort by sender, by date, by subject, by whatever I want. Like this is the most basic function for any kind of table with rows. And yet...
Yes conversation view is where if there's an email thread with, say, 8 replies, you still just have one "row" in your list of emails, and clicking into it reveals (usually) the most recent message with the others below.
I fucking hate it, passionately. Each email is its own communication and needs to be reviewed and addressed individually.
In like a personal conversation it's sort of tolerable but in a business context I can't stand it, it's insane that there are clients that don't let you turn it off.
As for me I use the gmail/workspace web interface for the most part, and no I don't like it but it's workable. For my main work email I also keep open a window to a client called "Mailstrom" which is stone cold simple and works great for the one thing I can't live with out, which is the ability to very quickly just see all emails from a sender, or with a certain subject.
When I get behind and have 200 emails to get through in an hour that ability to limit/sort is invaluable and I don't understand why gmail still can't do that.
The other email I subscribe to is Clean Email, which is basically OK but is the best one I've seen for unsubscribing to stuff and seeing which mailing lists I'm on and so forth. I log in to that one every week or so and use it to get out of mailing cadences I've found myself involved in.
I see you don’t like threads, you just want each message to be it’s own entity. I think Apple Mail has a setting for this but Shortwave is very much a more sophisticated version of threads compared to other clients. They detect side conversations in threads and split them off into separate threads with links between them.