I have over a terabyte of photos in Aperture, family has half a terabyte in iPhoto, whole family uses photostreams, nobody has your issues.
Apple doesn't have a great guide for best practice, and should fix that. But most of the troubles you outline, I feel you're "doing it wrong" or are actually flat wrong about how it works. This may be a training issue Apple should address.
As just one example, I very specifically want my device camera roll and combined photo stream separate. Combining them as you suggest has severely negative consequences your article doesn't consider. Edits on iOS carry over to desktop, you can edit on the loo all day if that suits your style. You never ever have to delete photos from your photo stream and no Apple dialog tells you to delete from photostream. If you set prefs right, you'll get photos imported exactly once.
Your letter raises awareness that people like photos. That's good.
But while waiting, look into some of the prefs dialogs in Aperture or iPhoto. I'm comfortable that every need you mentioned is handled.
But if you still can't find satisfaction for your particular workflow (e.g. photo pro doing commercial work in studio and on laptop in field), check out Image Capture plus the lesser known Auto Importer scriptable tool. You may have to mindlessly plug in a cable after a shoot or at least once in 30 days, but you won't have to press a key.
What are the complaints in the original article about not being able to treat your data as your own?
The complaints as I read them are about pain points in syncing and accessing the different photos you have spread across different Apple devices, and how whatever sync features exist today ("Photo streams") exacerbate rather than improve the situation.
All of them, I think. If any vendor were allowed to drop photo management software (as a first class citizen) on Apple machines, software that would even be allowed to manipulate their current cloud library through an open API - would anybody be asking Apple for anything?
But this is a pretty darned standard use case, isn't it? It's not like he's asking for the sun and the moon; he's just asking for a way to easily organize photos taken with multiple Apple devices, without using up all the storage in those devices.
That said, my family has the exact same photo problem, but only half of the devices involved are from Apple. A solution which was not limited to a closed ecosystem would be much better than an Apple-specific solution, in my opinion.
It's a standard use case for an average consumer who probably doesn't take that many photos and doesn't have much of a clue about backups. It's not a standard use case for anybody who is either a serious photographer or a geek....
Exactly this kind of service is where the closed Apple ecosystem should excel. Unfortunately, Apple has missed the transition from the Mac as a "media hub" to the cloud. iCloud came a bit late and they fail to keep up with the rapid innovation speed of other online services.
But how is the scenario described in the article not the standard use case for everyone who has more than one (internet connected) device that takes pictures?
Android/PC can do what the article wants, albeit with an initial investment of research and set-up but that's the choice... do you want buttoned up, everything 'just works' but only a certain way? or do you want customizable with tinkering required?
Isn't that part of the point? This is a totally normal thing to want, but no it is forbidden. Could a third party developer fix it? They could on Android.
They could, but it's strictly speaking not needed. It's already solved/fixed.
Just enable/install Google+/Picasa sync and you have all your pictures on all your Android-devices, and on the web, just in case you need it outside this semi-closed Google system.
It's not as non-standard as you think - I've got this exact pain-point. As well as my sister, who is not technical at all. I've gotten a couple of calls from her "Where are my pictures going?" and all I can tell her is "Hell if I know."
Hell for that matter, just try sharing your photos with your family on a home network. Both iTunes and Windows Media Player seem designed to frustrate that very common scenario.
1. Pick the best (free) iOS management tool for the job at the time
2. Invest eight years of curation and 70Gb of photos in it
3. Use the setup with more than one device and the same way that 20M+ other users use it
4. Expect that I shouldn't have to be a contortionist to continue to do so