Well, if the implementations of the standard are such a garbage fire what's the point chasing them? Just to check the box "standards compliant" and likely providing an abysmal UX and poor interoperability?

I fixated on Apple because they're often picked on for taking the highway, but on the other hand what's the point doing otherwise? What's a common ground if it's just a pipe dream?

Just because a chip is shitty doesn't mean it's worthless. In practice, Bluetooth is quite interoperable, and reliable enough for many use cases (especially the common, better-tested ones).

Breaking compatibility with that ecosystem out of spite is not conducive to getting adoption for a better product.

Well, the original posts report some frankly tragic scenarios - so bad that they “reboot to initialize” just to keep sane - in what are some pretty ubiquitous devices. Or not?

"Reboot to initialize" is ugly as hell and very brittle, but it's good enough for most I/O devices like keyboards or headphones. If the kernel is able to properly reinitialize the chip with all of its old association information, it might even be indistinguishable from a few hundred ms of interference. (Rebooting on errors is in fact quite common for all kinds of hardware in high-radiation environments, and is a pretty standard kernel technique for working around buggy hardware.)

Now, of course, multiple nines of uptime would be very nice to have (and open up new use-cases), but 2-3 nines is still a lot better than 0.

Fine, but you're rationalizing living with poor execution. I'm rationalizing with deep (perhaps goldplating) correctness.

I'm not "rationalizing", and neither are you.

You're arguing that it's not enough to make a correct implementation, but that it's also important to break compatibility with incorrect implementations.

I'm arguing that a better implementation that is compatible with current protocols is strictly better than a better implementation that is not Bluetooth-compatible.

If you make a piece of hardware that is good (e.g. doesn't randomly crash and need to be rebooted by the kernel), why is it a bad thing for it to try to connect to some flaky BT headset?