It sure would be nice if they could come up with something that provided developers an opportunity to develop best of breed experiences based on the type of dev

It sure would be nice if they could come up with something that provided developers an opportunity to develop best of breed experiences based on the type of device, screen, pixel resolution, etc. But, then they did. The Universal App template project provides for making separate UI layers for your applications. If your applications don't make use of screen space, blame developers. The OS and tooling support optimized experiences. There are fewer "opinions" than with 8. Decent Continuum experiences seem intended to make developers stretch, not users.