Hah, feel no regret about the potentially ranty tone, frankly, I often prefer to get feedback from people who are willing/able to rant, since they're both willing to be candid AND clearly have some interesting thoughts built up.

I'm honestly appreciative that you'd give this long a response, I've unironically been sharing this with peers internally for what an interesting spread of feedback it gives. I have to give a similar disclaimer of "no promises" BUT...

1. 100% agreed with you. We're currently working through this discussion for ServiceBus, actually, it's VERY apt you mention this now, as we've been working with the architects and other-language SDK owners to find proper semantic unification between Python's inclination for more fine-grained strongly typed errors, vs. e.g. dotnet's inclination to have unified exception types and "code"/"reason" fields. Can only speak for the data plane SDKs here (vs. -mgmt, that's a different team) but our architects have within the last 2 days expressed their alignment with the pattern you're requesting. (We explicitly as a guideline want users to not have to rely on any ad-hoc string parsing to distinguish exceptions) We've also been attempting (to lead into #2) produce both better samples EXPLICITLY to show common failure modes and "best practice defensive coding", but also conceptual guidelines (e.g. here [0]).

2. Preaching to the choir. Samples are a First Class Entity for our Track2 APIs (complete with validation, smoke tests, etc), used not only as inlined samples in docstrings and refdocs, but as long-form examples of E2E scenarios as you suggest. (and for more esoteric subject matter that may not be covered in primary long-form docs)

3. I'm not 100% sure I'm thinking of the right component when you say Storage, do you mean e.g. `azure-storage-blob`? #4 implies you may mean more of the block storage/VM interconnect logic, and unfortunately I can't speak with deep familiarity surrounding that, other than to note that the ARM template parameters for configuring this hasn't always been "great" (e.g. I think I recall there being a need to format a disk as a separate step? not sure if this is the sort of thing you're referring to, half thinking out loud, but that's more distant from my area) Would be curious to know specifically which transition was painful though/what kept changing, since it is a "core awareness" going forward that migration pain is a Major Friction Point for users ("well duh" says every dev ever) so I'm just curious to see if your specific callout is something we'd have been aware of/can impact.

4. See the above re core surface area of "working with disk"; and to your later point some of this may be more service-side than SDK, but your mention about attach/detach disks is salient and something I can perhaps throw a shout at someone about.

5. To make sure I've understood, you're serializing like, metadata/a record of the long-running operation and doing it yourself? The track 2 APIs use something called a Long Running Operation poller internally to facilitate this sort of operation; now this may not solve your scenario depending on how your control flow gets passed off or not/your need for serialization, so this may not actually change anything tractably for you, but mentioning on the side in case.
Curious re: what you mean by "is a bit clunky" though more precisely as well. And in terms of raw response consistency, yeah, that's not surprising, that's not one of the things I think we pin in backcompat (or even feasibly could, to your point, BUT we may be able to take more into account if there's any way to offer a continuous experience if this changes and folks were relying on it. Regardless it's something for me to keep in mind when doing design discussions with the service teams)

Glad the library fragmentation is well received. I'll candidly admit I was worried about that (was a user, not a maintainer when it happened, and did the normal grumpy-engineer thing of "they moved my cheese") but it does seem to have worked out nicely and given some good modularity.

Finally; Two cents, this was ten cents! I feel like I owe you big time for having given such a well-thought-out response. Thank you; sincerely, you didn't have to do this and have done us a big favor.

Absolutely get where you're coming from re: SDK being the public face, and that's what leads me to be eager to try and improve what we can. (And selfishly gotta make sure I can feel proud of the code that has my name attached to it :P ) I cannot tell you how much Reliability resonates with me. If nothing else, I can assure you this dev is in your corner; hardening, reliability, stability are the mantras within my purview. (signed, an-artist-formerly-known-as-SDET.)

[0] https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/tree/master/sd...