the whole maps debacle was a plot against Forstall

I still find Apple Maps to be awful. It consistently gives poor directions. For example the exit you need to take from the closest major road to reach my neighborhood splits once you are on it. If you continue straight you reach a stop light where you can then take a left and then continue 1/8th of a mile to the turn for my neighborhood. Apple Maps will instead have you go to the right when the exit splits and then have you continue another 1/2 mile before taking a u-turn and heading back the 5/8ths of a mile to turn into my neighborhood. Google Maps does the right thing. I now warn visitors to use Google Maps or to ignore these directions from Apple Maps.

I also live near a large city and a couple of smaller cities with busy downtown areas. In each of them the main streets are virtually impossible to perform a u-turn on because of the large amount of traffic. Apple Maps will insist on giving directions which involve taking u-turns on these streets. Google Maps will instead route you the easier way around the block instead of insisting on an impossible u-turn which in the end is slower because of the difficulty in actually performing the maneuver.

Also I find the directions from Apple Maps when taking an exit which further splits into multiple exits to be highly confusing. The spoken directions from Google Maps is much better in these circumstances.

Every new release I try Apple Maps again just to see if it has gotten better in these circumstances and every release I am disappointed.

Well it's useable sure but also not very good/useful. From a directions/routing standpoint it's pretty decent and I'm OK with how the route planning works. But they miss many POIs and the data they have is often stale, and their version of street view, while smoother, is not up to snuff at all.

I think it's really annoying and a major reason I have stopped using it even though I was an advocate at first. Apple can't be bothered to invest as much as Google did to have a proper open map system, with a good web version where people/business can post/add data easily. At this point the privacy stick is tiring because we don't get anything from it and they will comply/sell the data the minute they can profit from it anyway (as they have shown).

So, you just end up paying more for a product that is clearly worse and won't become much better because of Apple's ideology and how stingy they are. They generate a lot of cash but are unable to invest it in proper competitive software.

There are many bad things to be said about Google, but at least they manage to serve pretty good software that is open to everyone...