Hardware designed to play high quality music. (Think using Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Studio for music production)
Dedicated buttons instead of all touch screen.
More options for integration with other devices or systems
No distractions. Phones nowadays demand our attention for every little thing. Every app, no matter what it is, has notifications.
The Bluetooth is better.
You can literally hear the difference in the quality of the music if you use good quality headphones/ear buds. The same song, same file, will not sound the same if it's a good quality FLAC.
They're clearly using shaming tactics. By calling it a "tantrum" they try to make those mods look childish. In reality the mods demanded something to make their jobs easier, the company refused, so they parted ways.
I did something similar except I wrote a C# program and used AvaloniaUI to build a cross-platform GUI. It was a project to learn C#. I have to make some updates to that now that I think about it...
I just have my music collection in Playlist and use Audacious to play them. All the music in the Playlist are saved in relative format so I can just copy the folders and keep the same Playlists
I would love a FOSS version of Rhino3D.