paulywog
Would the splits and merges definitely make the signal integrity worse to the point that it wouldn't work? Maybe not. But if you're designing a high speed cutting edge standard, you probably don't want to make decisions that limit the best signal integrity an implementer could achieve. Signal integrity is all about balancing the bad SI decisions you have to make because of some product goal or whatever with tighter tolerances elsewhere. The more "clean" the standard is, the more tolerance it has for the implementers.
It was surprisingly hard to gather all of this information in one place and actually implement it given the resources on the internet a few years ago. Even then, there were still some board revisions that got it a bit wrong, one where I left out the decoupling capacitors I'd later learn were a critical detail, and one where I put all the wiggles clumped together at the middle of the shorter trace and so despite both signals arriving at the end at the correct time, they were out of phase for nearly the whole trace run and caused (presumably) cross talk between each other. But I did get it working in the end :)
A lot of USB3 routing is reducing stubs. When the signals are going as fast as they are in USB3, they're essentially a wave going down the line, and if there's a "stub" the wave will actually hit the end of the wire and reflect back, causing interference. Having one of the pins not connect to your processor would create a stub inherent in the design, which is probably a bad idea.
When you dig into the details of the signals of USB3+ electrically it's truly remarkable they're able to mass produce cheap consumer grade equipment to implement it.
To give you an idea, the lengths of USB3 traces in your board need to be matched, so you add wiggles to the shorter trace to make it ever so slightly longer. But those wiggles can't get too far from the opposing trace in the diff pair either because that changes the way the traces are coupled together. Also, if the layer above/below is not a solid ground plane, you will run into issues as the signal will propagate through the wire faster/slower depending on what's around it. This is so critical that you use "impedance controlled" PCBs that place a tight tolerance on the spacing of your layers so that you can be sure it doesn't change along the length of your trace. And, of course, you want to avoid sharp bends in your traces as those will act like a stub.
None of this is bad engineering on the part of the USB IF, just that if you want to send data over a USB cable reliably at 5gbits, or now 40gbits, you're really pushing the limits of modern electrical design.
I think we still have a lot to figure out with our charging infrastructure, in cities where often it's hard just to park. I want an EV badly, but it'd be a constant struggle to keep it charged.
There's also an issue with car companies generally not making the cars I want anymore, though I understand this is a me problem. There's not a nice plug-in hybrid small convertible, even if I could charge it.
Apple's driver did a great job of masking that with fuzzing and (I believe) predictive movement, that's the reason it seemed good in Mac OS X. But you can even tell in OS X if you're really looking for it!