I recently wrote about how the Mac dock bugs me and a some people seemed to agree.  Now I have a beef with iTunes.  You know what, iTunes just plain sucks.  When you see past the sexy interface and quality skins and get down to managing a large digital library, it falls completely apart.  I hate to say it too considering I have about 40 gig of music, videos and apps in my library.  It's painfully slow, always buggy, and ridiculously awkward if you're a serious digital collector and have a lot of digital detritus to manage.  I've been toting my incredibly bloated iTunes library around with me across multiple desktops, laptops and external drives now for almost a decade.  Pods and phones and pads have come and gone yet iTunes lives on, unstable and slow.  You'd think someone would come up with a serious replacement by now, something that could connect to the store and authenticate devices as well as manage a robust library and intuitively play a party mix now and then.  But no, we get some great player control extensions like Bowtie, Ecoute and Coversutra but nothing that would let me once and for all delete iTunes and actually use my music the way I want to.  The more I use it and the more I try to do with iTunes, the more I come to hate it.  Just applying album art work takes a digital eternity these days.  And heavens forbid you want to use your old 3G iPhone along side your new iPhone4 or keep your 6 old iPods going after syncing your brand new Nano for the first time.  Ok so maybe I am exaggerating (just a little) but every upgrade does make my life worse and not better.  I blame Apple and their creeping new Machiavellian policies.  AAPL, in their newfound market dominance, has decided that the community-based and elegantly efficient product roots that pumped their stock up to a high of almost $280 a share were a fluke and a more Microsoft-like heavy DRM hand is in order.  Big mistake.  Apple needs to open back up to their core segment and return to their stance of the past.  For what they spent on launching Ping, which I really don't get yet, they could have fixed everything that's wrong with OSX, iTunes, the iPhone, iPod and the iPad.  But locking everything down and everyone out is not the right road.