"It's almost as bad as RJ-45 cables with those stupid nibs that get caught on anything like a fishhook"

That is to stop dumb ass people pulling out cablesm when pulling on there own to find out where it goes. IT support people would spend there entire day finding the cable some prat has pulled out.

"If the standards people had any foresight, they would have used power with 10Base-T (and the nice easy to get RJ45 connector) and done it that way. The ethernet guys had it all working, all they needed to add was the power"

That would be PoE then would it? Only been around several years now Power is sent over the unused pairs at 48v, so that it can power phones, webcams etc. No need for "extra" ports as it perfectly safe to send PoE to non PoE devices, in fact my laptops port connects to my phone that then connects to a PoE that then connect to a switch.

For those that think that more power should be sent down the cable, you need to learn a bit more about power and signalling. The more power you send down you need thicker cables and you also introduce moreinterferance so you either a) increase the shielding, making the cable thicker and stiffer, or b) reduce the speed of the connection.

I think USB is fine (not sure why people struggle to plug it in, it only goes in one direction and the logo is on the top!). It does excatly what is was designed for, if people try to use it for things it shouldn't do, then thats the manufacturers fault.

At the end of the day, it was designed to replace, serial, parrallel and PS/2 ports, with one interface, which it does rather well.