iTunes Match for TV Shows is horribly broken

I was quite excited, after install iTunes 10.6, to see that a fair few of my TV shows show up as being available for “re-download”.  Silly me for assuming that meant they were available in 1080p as promised.  Some are.  Most aren’t.  iTunes happily downloads them again, with no way for me to tell ahead of time if they are duplicates or not.  So I’ve burned at least 20 GiB so far today on duplicates, which I then have to manually find and clean up in a very tedious process.  Awesome.

To add insult to injury, this new version of iTunes no longer groups most of my TV shows together properly – now most episodes are shown as being in their own season.  And there’s no apparent way for me to fix that.

On the face of this, you would logically conclude that this new functionality was never actually tested.  Of course, that seems unlikely to say the least, which leads to the even worse conclusion that it was tested, and the designers, implementers, QAers and senior management – whom were no doubt paying close attention to such a high-level feature – all ignored the fact that it’s shit.

I don’t subscribe to the “oh noes! apple’s quality is all gone!” notion that people have been throwing around since Steve Jobs’ death – but only because, honestly, stupid shit like this has been happening for a lot longer than that.  iTunes is a magnet for it, as is iPhoto and Xcode.

Incidentally, I’m somewhat perplexed that the one app that many people whinge about most incessantly, Mail, is actually one I would hold up as an example of one that actually works properly the vast majority of the time.  Except with Gmail.  Because Gmail’s IMAP support is absolutely awful.  I wonder if blame is being misattributed to Mail.