I don’t think the examples you’ve given point toward the polish being “skin deep” id argue those features themselves are skin deep. The snapping isn’t important to me as i use full screen almost exclusively, apps being a mess (sometimes) isn’t a macos thing its a dev thing and so much less of a clusterfuck than uninstalling windows programs don’t even get me started. I have never had to recover any mac so I can’t comment on that. Having software that’s different and maybe a little clunky but rock solid almost never crashes is so much more worth it than software that can be tweaked to the max but crashes more often.