I am also not a fan of the pivot to Snap. However, it is worth mentioning, that it has only been two years (I think, at least 22.04 LTS was the first release I had to wrestle with them on my machine), and the experience has become a lot better during this time.

It took them 7 years to figure out that nobody needed Unity. Hopefully Snap will get sorted faster.

I understand your frustration with snaps, but I consider it a very good distribution channel for commercial applications on Linux systems. Something that Appimage or Flatpak could not easily provide without a commercial entity backing it like Canonical.

Snap is a dead-end; but as usual, it takes some time until Canonical realizes that.

If you want to easily distribute commercial applications, use flatpak. You could even have your own flatpak repo for your own products, if you wanted (it is really just static http).

Snap apparently has a few advantages, like supporting non-gui apps (for servers) which isn't a good fit for AppImage or Flatpak. That said, I generally stick to Docker for server apps.

I agree that the flatpak/appimage/snap options for apps, and in particular commercial apps is a decent idea. I think integration and permissions should probably move to something similar to the UX for phone apps though... it feels weird having to try to configure permissions that should be in the box.