Sorry that you feel this way. For me those threads are more about people being frustrated that they can't use the iPad the way they want to. It is not the fact that iPads are useless. Far from it. It is about personal needs and preferences.
To be honest I do not even stop thinking if it is fear or not. For me things are simpler. Look I either find right away the benefits of having a device and I buy it and use it or I don't. The notion of researching and trying to accommodate my workflow to fit into a device that price is just wrong for me. I do not have the time to waste on that.
I see it as short-term pain for long-term gain.
I got my first iPad in 2012, and since then, I have been slowly but surely finding new ways of getting my work done on it. I guess it helps that the stuff I do on an iPad cannot be done on a laptop (or a Mac for that matter) anyways, so there really isn't any alternative or any turning back for me.
I am a teacher using his iPad in the classroom. It's mirrored to an Apple TV hooked up to the classroom projector. Mainly annotate on pdf documents in notability, and since I already spend so much time on it, it feels like a natural extension to see just how far I can go with it.
Then came storing my files in dropbox, synced to my iOS devices via the documents app. Which in turn also radically changed the way I work, from storing files in flash drives to dumping it all in the cloud, which has made things more convenient for me.
So yes, the initial first step was more cumbersome for me, but what I learnt was it was easy to fixate on the hurdles caused by the initial change, but it's way harder to anticipate how one change can cause many things to change as a reaction to a new normal.
Teaching with an iPad in class frees me up to roam around the classroom, so I can monitor my students more closely. Moving to the cloud means I don't have to fiddle with external storage. My iPad's camera makes it extremely easy to take snapshots of my students' work for discussion purposes.
It wasn't cheap, it wasn't easy, but it was worth it.
For me personally it is all about efficiency. I find the tool that could make me the most productive and efficient one. In my case when it comes to taking digital notes and brainstorming or reading and highlighting the iPad is the best (with the help of Apple Pencil). When it comes to everything else I prefer my laptop because it is more comfortable and I can be faster on it. Can I potentially find workarounds for iPad? Most probably I can for the most part but why I should spend time in doing this? As of now I don't see a reason to do this. I love my laptop and I am not motivated in forcing myself to struggle with a device that as of now poses restriction for me.
Again, for me, it came down to short-term pain vs long term gain.
Let me use an example. As the Social Studies coordinator for my school, I send a weekly email update to my colleagues teaching that subject instructing them on what to do for that week's lessons. The backstory was that when I first took up the position, many teachers were either not teaching it (opting to use the Social Studies periods to cover other subjects, or just unfamiliar with the syllabus). The weekly lesson plan has the lesson details, plus resources attached inside.
I initially did this on a Mac. So what I would do was create a new email template, use a text expander shortcut to generate an appropriate title for the week, insert the instructions via Copied, then attach the files which I had already sorted by week (saved in dropbox).
I would subsequently migrate this workflow over to my iPad (and iPhone), using a shortcut I devised via the workflow (now known as shortcuts) app, which replicates the steps to crafting said email. It took me about half an hour of fiddling to get the shortcut up and running the way I wanted it to, but once it did, I was able to not only send out the 6 emails every week in less time, but also do it from anywhere and at anytime, without having to start up my Mac first.
The experience I gleaned from this task would also translate to crafting a couple more email templates for other purposes, as well as a few other shortcuts for assorted use cases.
I have been using said workflow for the third year running. Any time I invested in automating this process via the workflow app has long paid for itself. And the added bonus was that any workflow I had initially created for use on the iPad is also available on my iPhone, because they both share the same apps and settings. This makes me more accessible, because I am able to do more work from my iPhone and iPad, which are on me more often than my Mac, and benefit from always-on cellular.
In hindsight, what I learnt upon some reflecting was that because the Mac allowed me to brute-force my way through most activities without encountering too much pain, there was little incentive to automate those tasks, as macOS is just good enough that it's rarely worth my time to do so. Conversely, trying to perform a moderately complex task without the right app on iOS introduces so much friction that I feel compelled to automate them whenever possible.
I don't see it as a compromise. It is what it is, I did what I had to do for my job, and I am better off for it.
I read those threads to see if someone had found an approach that could make me that efficient on an iPad. However as of now all I see is list of workarounds and acceptance that I will be slower on my iPad. This does not work for me. I am all for accepting new ways as long as it does not make me less efficient and it does not waste my time. The moment it start doing it I am out.
I think that people also need to look beyond their own noses. After all, there was a time when the mouse was considered a gimmick and the command line was the more efficient way of working. "Productivity" is often limited to programming, excel, and CAD, as if no other type of profession exists.
As difficult as they are, we more often than not over-estimate platform shifts in the short term but under-estimate them in the long term. When Steve Jobs said that the iPad would be the car and the Mac would be the pickup truck, I think he too envisioned a future where it was 90% iOS and 10% OS X (as he called it then).
The thing about vision, which Steve had in spades, is you have to be able to look beyond the present and your current workflows, and realize that tools are always getting better. So when the iPad was introduced in 2010, I knew without a doubt that this would be the future. I also knew it would take a while before the hardware and software got to the point where it really could replace a Mac 90% of the time.
Getting there is only a matter of time. And probably sooner rather than later.
