You don't advertise WIP software as "built with finesse"; and even if you do, you must at the very least put said finesse into the choice of screenshots you present.
Yes, but it only devolved from Mac OS 9 by adding a bunch of unpolished NeXT GUIs, and the development necessitated the temporary removal of features and apps that were already polished.
I‘ve never really worked with Rhapsody, so I couldn’t tell. I came to Mac OS X from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD, the first version I actually used as a daily driver (with the odd boot to Mac OS 9 for some stuff) was the public beta in 2000 (which was Aqua already of course).
Rhapsody was an unholy mix of NeXTstep implementation with a bastardized version of Apple's Platinum theme, which wasn't designed to support NeXT's UI and display technologies. Steve hated it and continued to use OpenStep on a ThinkPad.
That looks like it's SwitchBoard, not iOS. Users do not have access to the internal Apple test software.
As for Rhapsody, that looked decent, it had a similar vibe to A/UX where it looks like Mac OS Classic but runs Unix.
Perhaps you are referring to Kodiak or Cheetah, but those were pretty GUI-consistent at that time. Granted, up to Panther it was just Aqua and getting it to work consistently and performant, but I don't think it was ever in the state that this RavynOS is. That's mostly because NeXTStep as a foundation already had an existing GUI that was consistent.
RavynOS is having a bad presentation because it looks like some sort of odd partially-done theme based on CDE/Motif.
Yes, but you are straw-manning the argument. This is skankphone UI - a UI used by the technical team building back-end services and features for the original iPhone. The actual UI was being built in parallel, and obviously it never looked like that.
There was also a time when the iPhone looked like this - https://i.imgur.com/wwH2UoF.jpg