The strangest thing for me reading this is that, well, I loved Aperture. I used it loyally from v1 until long after it was EOL'd. I spent thousands of hours in it, and it really fit my ideal workflow.

There was a lot of functionality/crap in there that I did not use, a lot of functionality was hidden away behind context menus and a lot of promised features around integration with plugins and 3rd party never really materialized, but in terms of core function it was a total workhorse.

Apple ultimately went to great lengths to purge it from existence, even for those of us with paid licenses who'd been told (or at least safely presumed) that we'd be able to install it on new machines via the app store, even if it wasn't available for purchase. In reality, they removed the binary from the cache. At one point, I went through a ridiculously elaborate process of obtaining a certain kind of physical license from eBay and spent hours emailing random Apple employees - likely some of the folks mentioned in this story - getting them to make exceptions and pull favours to make it possible for me to install it one last time before Catalina pulled the rug out for good.

Fuckin' Apple.