Is the ATV2 a true Apple Appliance or a Toy?

Question

Having spent a few hours studying all the problems that people are having, I am amazed at the difficulty the ATV2 is causing. It was supposed to be the transformational device that did not replicate the problems of the ATV1 which was a "hobby" device.
I have lived with ATVs since inception. I have 4 running now and after living with the ATV2 for a few weeks, I went out and bought a spare ATV1.
Near as I can tell, no one in their right mind would ask a non computer literate person to use the ATV2. My wife has come to hate it and refuses to use it. Yet she uses the ATV1 "hobby" devices with no problems and loves them!
I use my 4 ATVs as streaming devices, with the exception of pictures. We load them up with family pictures and do slideshow as screen saver and while streaming music from ITUNES for many hours a day.
It took me about half an hour to figure out how to get the streaming / sharing to work with the ATV2. Tricky of the design team to make it so you have to do a little on line research to figure out that a feature of ITUNES is you have to activate home sharing in multiple places to get it to actually share. I can see grandma doing that and going out to write a great report on the ATV2!
Once I got the ATV2 associated with my home library, imagine my surprise when I learned through experience that the thing has to RELOAD the library data EVERY time you use it! And in a single session if you switch from . . . say a TV show to a movie. What a great feature. Since my library is currently at 4 TERABITES, that little wait while the ATV2 finds out what TV shows or movies are out there are really enjoyable. I plan tasks, like rotating the tires on one of the cars for these little opportunities.
Why couldnt Apple designers just come up with a smaller, leaner, cheaper streaming version of the current ATV? It works great in streaming mode.
Hopefully some day they will see the light and transform the ATV2 into a useful device. But it is not right now.
I am buying up a bunch of ATV1s to keep me going for the next few years until someone comes out with a better solution or Apple sees the light.

Answer 1

I've put mine in the kitchen where we tend to watch content from the computer a little less.
The grouping of content has been a bit of a nightmare, I've had around 1,000 home videos listed individually amongst around about 300 commercial titles in movies and 14 seasons of Frost all listed separately along with many other similar scenarios in tv shows. With a lot of content, this all becomes difficult to navigate.
I've always been able to stream HD content flawlessly by wifi to my first generation Apple tv, in fact I could do so to several at the same time, so the second generation model holds no advantages there. Although I've found that the second generation model has issues connecting to the itms store occasionally, when my macs and my first generation models don't.
Buying from iTunes isn't the end of the world, but of course I now need to let it download fully before I can stream to the Apple tv, thankfully we don't do this in the kitchen all that much.
On the reloading issue, no it doesn't take more than a few moments but it's always there when you move from menu to menu, it wasn't there at all on the first generation model.