I few weeks ago, after a long history of purchasing Samsung phones (S4, S6, s7 edge plus) because of the good hardware, I got an S8+ after my S7e+ abandoned me. This was the turning point where I decided I could no longer accept such awful software experience. Now there is even a physical button for their garbage assistant. The Android notifications are broken in favor of small things that do not allow you to read the message from Whatsapp or Telegram or whatever, and so forth. I returned the S8+ and switched to a Google Pixel 2 XL and it is the best phone I've ever had. Samsung needs to get its shit together and understand that even if in their fantasy world where the management live they want to compete on services, it is totally impossible and actually they are just destroying the Android experience. If it was not for the software approach Samsung takes, I bet we could have far less Apple iPhone users.
"If you look at the reason that the iPod exists, it's because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn't do the appropriate software, couldn't conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod's really just software. It's software in the iPod itself, it's software on the PC or the Mac, and it's software in the cloud for the store. And it's in a beautiful box, but it's software. If you look at what a Mac is, it's OS X, right? It's in a beautiful box, but it's OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it's software." - Steve Jobs (2007)
IMHO, 80's and 90's Japanese hardware gave me a much better experience than anything from a software company. For example, everytime I go to use my Sonos box, it wants to update the app, the firmware, or both. The constant software updates fix bugs and security holes, but they also bring unwanted features, frequently interface changes and attempts to upsell more of the same.
I still have a Rotel poweramp from 1985 in my front room which the Sonos is plugged into, working flawlessly. There's no chance my Sonos box will still be working past 2050.
Then why not use your 1985 Rotel poweramp instead of the Sonos?
If you added the functionality of the Sonos to the Rotel poweramp, it would have the same complexity-based problems.
Obviously I wanted the convenience of streaming an MP3 to the amp versus using a CD player.
I disagree that all solutions to this problem need the same complexity inherent in the Sonos and that the user experience could not be improved.
Using that with shairport-sync to cast to a Woburn speaker gives me more than adequate results and I'm not even using a USB DAC nor digital audio output via HDMI, just the Pi's basic line-out.