I am so sick of the crappy way iTunes and iPad handle app folders.

Question

I'm a long-time iPad user who, for various reasons, has accumulated over 500 apps. It is absolutely essential that I keep my apps organized into folders. This requires a lot of folders, too: with a maximum of 20 apps per folder, that's at least 25 folders.
What prompted this message is that after the last time a major software update decimated my carefully-constructed folder organization (which itself is inexcusable), I spent two hours with the horrible iTunes interface dragging and dropping and creating new folders and getting everything re-organized, finally, only to have iTunes fail to sync the changes to my iPad.
It synced, but afterwards, the iPad still had its old folder layout, and iTunes still indicated the new one. I power-cycled the iPad and tried syncing again: same thing. I quit and re-launched iTunes and synced again, and lo, iTunes wiped all the tedious work I'd done and just copied the defective organization back from the iPad into iTunes.
This isn't a one-time thing. It's consistently been the most time-consuming, time-wasting aspect of owning an iPad, and really, it's inexcusable for Apple to have let this go on and on for so long.
Why not just let them float free instead of constantly hitting my head against the "folder wall" and gradually move the ones I use a lot to early pages? Well, it turns out that if you have too many apps installed, the iPad doesn't show them all: there's a limit to how many pages of apps it will show. Dang it.
Why not use the search page to get to my apps? Well, I could, but some of them are named in unfortunate ways. (Also, when you search for an app, it doesn't indicate whether it's located in a folder nor in which folder it's located. That's not just stupid: it's caused me to go manually poking through folder after folder to find an app that I've "mis-filed".)
And if you have multiple iDevices? I recently jumped from Android to iPhone, and guess what: I had to go through the whole, pain-staking process of creating a folder organization for the phone, because I couldn't use the iPad's as a template. I did learn my lesson, though: the iPhone only has installed the apps that I use on a regular basis. At least that cuts down on the length of the pain if not the intensity.
C'mon, Apple, get a clue! This app folder "organization" is about as crappy as it gets. (Though you have a bad history of poor organization: how long did it take to get photo albums?) Please, please, please, if you can't at least get the novice-programmer-stupid-bugs out of your folder sync/iTunes logic, come up with an alternative.
Here, I can think of a REALLY EASY one right off the bat: let me tag my apps and search/access them via tags. (Oh, say, then maybe I could just have a "smart folder" to make them easier to find.) (What? Be able to organize apps in more than two dimensions?) Or at least make the drag-and-drop-to-move-apps interface (on both the iPad and iTunes) less fragile and frustrating.
Back to bashing my head against the wall... thanks for listening.

Answer 1

I've had a not-so-rewarding experience with one of Apple's support-issue-submission forms. It was a reminder that as much as I'd prefer to think otherwise, Apple may be unusual, but it's just another company where it's not possible for everyone to be "above average".
Frankly, I'd be happy in this case if iTunes dropped an XML file with apps-in-folders, let me mess with it, and then loaded and applied it to shuffle things around. That's one thing I love about OS X, but then that also allows one to be too smart for one's own good. Be careful what I ask for, I guess...