I like the idea of USB C, but actual my experience with it makes me happy to currently be on a micro. You just learn which way the plug goes. USB A on the other hand, that's trickier...

I believe micro USB is the same way.

Do you know what the reasoning behind this decision was?

Lightning also appears to have severe problems with arcing.

Well, it IS "Lightning"...

I can't speak to arcing problems.

Not likely to spend real money on something Google put their name on again.

Make a small tool (I use plastic food packaging from something like fresh strawberries) to grab and hook that stuff out of there.

And then, it works fine.

AFAIK an insertion cycles test is linear and extremely repetitive e.g. no bending forces and no foreign objects. It doesn't cover the wide range of real world stresses.

For example, I have a Fiio bluetooth adapter which will not charge with a high rate charger, only a USB-A 5v charger via a USB-A -> USB-C adapter. Is it my MacBook and iPad charger’s fault? The cable’s fault? Fiio’s USB-C chipset fault? Beats me - I have no way to know or find out, since I don’t have the tools to sniff out who is not handling the charging protocol properly (and yes, this could be the cable, since there is silicon attached to the USB-C plugs on both sides of the cable which may be involved in the negotiation as well).

This isn’t a huge problem for me now, since I have very few USB-C cables, and none which are not effectively always plugged into a charger. However, in a decade I’ll have to figure this out with a box of cables with wildly differing capabilities.

Knowing the data rate of a cable is an utter mess. But for charging, every cable can do 60 watts. For most purposes the difference between 60 and 100 watts is pretty minor.

It's possible they exist, but I have yet to have personal experience of an actual Thunderbolt cable that didn't have a thunderbolt mark on the connector.

Yes. We went from something remediated by looking at the plug, to something that can’t be remediated without trying it and seeing if it fails.

My playstation vita has limped along for years with a finicky edge connector that takes some care to get it to charge. The vita is astonishingly easy to do field repairs on, but you can't replace that connector. It's a good thing that the kind of games I like to play on the Vita come out on Steam these days.

Many electronic devices EOL because of problems with connectors. When I was an undergrad, I think every engineering student in the world had an HP28S calculator, in which the springs would eventually push the batteries right through the battery door. People tried taping it, but short from running it on a bench power supply, none of those engineering students found a great answer to fix it.