Yup. And I think that's the dichotomy: "supports everything on everything" or "cable doesn't cost $60 and goes farther than 2 meters", take your pick.
Expense was pretty much a foregone conclusion at the start of the thunderbolt "one cable for everything" experiment, and now people want to do that with usb in general. Sure, that'll be great, but it's going to be expensive, including in places that don't need those capabilities. If you allow deviations from the standard, then you are back to things being incompatible with various devices/cables/chargers. They allowed that with power profiles (in particular) and video capabilities and now it's a mess.
Framing profiles in terms of device use-cases is my attempt at turning that soup back into something comprehensible for average consumers, while keeping the benefit. People approach this as "I want to plug my phone into the charger and have it just work", "I want to plug my dock into my laptop and do everything through one cable", etc, and those are actually use-cases and not feature profiles, they don't really care that the laptop needs 40V 2.5A or 25V 3A, they just want it to work. But of course a $10 vape pen (or phone) doesn't need 40V 2.5A charging. So you have a "phone profile" and a "laptop profile" and iterate those things as groups/featuresets and not as a bunch of profiles thrown into one enormous standard.
You can retain most of the "universal standard" juice without squeezing too hard on the "$60 cable" expense side of things. You could have one cable for laptop docks and one cable for phone charging and have a lot of overlap between, but still not have to use a $60 cable to charge your phone just because that's what a laptop needs, and yet not have a confusing free-for-all of "this charger doesn't do that".
I'm just a rando though so it's not like I have any say.
Expense was pretty much a foregone conclusion at the start of the thunderbolt "one cable for everything" experiment, and now people want to do that with usb in general. Sure, that'll be great, but it's going to be expensive, including in places that don't need those capabilities. If you allow deviations from the standard, then you are back to things being incompatible with various devices/cables/chargers. They allowed that with power profiles (in particular) and video capabilities and now it's a mess.
Framing profiles in terms of device use-cases is my attempt at turning that soup back into something comprehensible for average consumers, while keeping the benefit. People approach this as "I want to plug my phone into the charger and have it just work", "I want to plug my dock into my laptop and do everything through one cable", etc, and those are actually use-cases and not feature profiles, they don't really care that the laptop needs 40V 2.5A or 25V 3A, they just want it to work. But of course a $10 vape pen (or phone) doesn't need 40V 2.5A charging. So you have a "phone profile" and a "laptop profile" and iterate those things as groups/featuresets and not as a bunch of profiles thrown into one enormous standard.
You can retain most of the "universal standard" juice without squeezing too hard on the "$60 cable" expense side of things. You could have one cable for laptop docks and one cable for phone charging and have a lot of overlap between, but still not have to use a $60 cable to charge your phone just because that's what a laptop needs, and yet not have a confusing free-for-all of "this charger doesn't do that".
I'm just a rando though so it's not like I have any say.