I get exactly what you're saying. But my original post was only ever about wanting a means to download and play games. Those other clients, they're secondary to Steam, often tertiary, and I'm fine with that. It's not a problem for me because they do what they're advertised to do. None of the companies behind those clients are lying to themselves thinking they can even come close to the tens of millions of monthly users Steam has, which is why they often keep their clients so simple. They likely don't want to bog down users with stuff because they know it's gonna be wasted on most people when they're gonna go back to Steam after they're done playing Battlefield or Overwatch. And it's not like they don't innovate; it's just that EA Access or Uplay's SAM don't make ripples in the same way new features to Steam do, because the audience for Origin and Uplay can't even compare. You can't hold them to the same standard, because Steam is leagues beyond the rest in regards to audience size and reach. That doesn't mean you can't criticize the smaller clients, of course.
And yeah, this likely comes off as me defending Steam's competition while smacking Valve across the face. That's not my intention, and never was.
It's not necessarily that they aren't feature complete so much as them being awful.
Battle.net, for example, is terrible. It's a resource-hogging piece of junk that hasn't been meaningfully updated since 2009. It still has awful things like region-locked friends lists, and it takes them years to implement basic stuff like being able to hide your online status (which they added about four years after it became standard practice). Its UI is designed for no more than six games and is going to basically break now that Activision is there. So people saying that they're happy to use Battle.net over Steam come off as being contrarian.
Likewise, the Bethesda Launcher is baaaaad. When I used it it was unresponsive, it somehow consumed 4mb of my bandwidth doing absolutely nothing. Quake Champions took me 6 minutes to download on Steam; on Bethesda's launcher, it took six
hours and took up so much bandwidth that it made my Internet completely unusable for the entire duration. Even before that, despite telling the launcher to install my game to a different drive (Launcher was installed on my OS drive (120 GB SSD, with very little room)), it actively decided to download the game to where the launcher was installed - BUT, despite not having room enough to actually download everything, it kept going. The percentage kept counting up and downloading at an alarmingly slow rate. Not once did it say "Hey chief, not enough room to download on the drive. Try installing the launcher elsewhere" so I didn't even notice until the next day.
The Bethesda launcher would forget my password randomly, so I constantly had to reset it. It made me relog in every few days. The UI is shockingly awful and buggy - when I installed it for the Fallout 4 creation kit, the bar on the left was full of games I didn't own. So dragged them all off and it made me leave one of them. So I then added the Creation Kit to the list and removed the game that was stuck there and then my Creation Kit icon just transformed into a Wolfenstein 2 icon. So after that I thought that I wouldn't use the sidebar, and after that I reopened the launcher to do stuff with the Creation Kit again, but there were like 50 icons for the Creation Kit and like 2 for Fallout 76. I couldn't remove any of them. So it was just broken.
I brought all this up to their tech support and they just threw their arms up in confusion (because what are they going to do, the software is broken). Reinstalling it didn't fix it so I just stopped bothering.
So it's just kind of frustrating seeing people (not necessarily you) try and frame this as "WHY DO YOU LOVE THE STEAM MONOPOLY HMMM?!" when it's more the case of not wanting to be "forced" into downloading bare-bones clients of
extremely varying quality for the sole purpose of having more of that company's products shoved down our throats.
