I agree with your post. Had a bad experience with the chromecast recently, but I managed to figure out that it required an update (through the android cast app) even though it did not indicate it anywhere else. I guess they assumed that it would automatically update frequently enough that my problem would be a rare edge case, but I'd had it unplugged for about a year and wanted to use it for a new TV. Haven't had a TV for ages, I learned a few days later it had the cast protocol built into it out of the box...