Waves crashing against the shore

That's annoying.  Google has opted to discontinue Google Wave, amusingly due to a lack of user interest.  Really?  You might think they'd get it into a usable state before balking at the lack of user interest.

I know some people have had more luck than I with it.  However,  I was really looking forward to it reaching a state where

• it wouldn't consume all my systems' resources if I left it open in a tab for half an hour
• it would stop crashing when I tried to post messages, causing me to lose my hard work
• it would stop failing to sync interminably without my realising it wasn't syncing for the last 20 minutes (causing me to lose all my work; data loss Is Evil)
• they'd abandon that annoying, clumsy vertical scroll method
• my user icon would stop getting lost, along with my friends
• I could actually manage basic user functionality like removing someone from a wave
• they'd actually notify me of updates to waves in real time rather than 2 hours later
• advertised functionality like inserting images and videos would actually work
• it goes on

I mean, Google Wave has encompassed many good ideas.   Yes, Google Wave itself is somewhat directionless and lacks identity, but that is a separate problem.  I am annoyed at their giving up because people like me weren't using it while it was in a state where it was unusable to people like me.  Argh.