Completely interchangeable cords for everything is an excellent goal that everyone agrees would be a beautiful thing. That idea/direction is not what we're crit

Completely interchangeable cords for everything is an excellent goal that everyone agrees would be a beautiful thing. That idea/direction is not what we're criticizing. It's the implementation that we're criticizing. In particular, the implementation that still requires separate cords for separate tasks (because each USB-C cable supports an unknown subset of the capabilities) but removes the labels and visual / physical cues that you could use to identify which tasks it supports. Not only does this fail to achieve the dream, it fails to even live up to the previous generation. Eventually we'll reach the dream and it will be great, but there was no need to jump in the pit of spikes on our way there. It wasn't blocking the road, it wasn't camouflaged, it was out there in the open, and the USB-C guys decided it would be fun to jump in. Why?