It must be a wondrous experience, living at peak bell curve. You seem to base a good deal of personal pride traveling from thread to thread, emotively defending Garmin from criticism while employing whatever form of logical fallacy most directly serves your purpose at the time. The why isn't relevant, but it is a curious observation nonetheless.
Fact is, generally speaking we're looking operating systems, themes, and software packages; D2 and Fenix share an OS but have different themes. The 'features' you're referring to are called packages and that is Garmin's justification for product segmentation as you've pointed in regard to the Tactix vs D2. In your example, is it easy to notice that the D2 is the most feature rich wearable Garmin produces, containing almost all of Tactix's apps and adding a few GA specific of it's own. Basically in Garmin's world, with a few notable exceptions like MARQ or Decent, products are divided primarily by packages... One watch has the fishing apps, this watch has the toy soldier apps, this watch has the general aviation apps. Packages are just applications bundled and distributed via software image, but at their core they're no different than any browser you've ever downloaded or piece of software you've ever installed on your phone, pc, or tablet. My computer doesn't have the image editing 'feature', it simply has photoshop installed.
So far you and I are on the same page, relatively speaking, because each software image will be a separate product in regard to packaging, testing, and distribution. Practically speaking, it's not difficult to cascade changes because the apps and the OS are usually version bound and the products so similar, i.e. you don't have to download a new browser every time Windows Update runs because the underlying operating environment is rarely substantially altered. Though it is technically feasible that some changes will have a global impact, very few actually do.
That said, and the reason I mentioned that curve experience, is because only a child thinks of a substantial corporate entity as 'stupid'. I do not, but I also do not believe that the consumer wearables division is at all relevant to Garmin's GPS products or their defense contracts or their general aviation businesses either. Why the actual *** anyone would conflate them is beyond me. What I think is that Garmin's priorities no longer include the consumer space, much like Nvidia's have recently diverged - with comparable declines in consumer satisfaction. I also think Garmin has become complacent and therefore neglected this division and the results are apparent with a hyper-segmented ecosystem and an apparent mountain of tech debt - as evidenced by their recent and troubled OS integration initiative. Consequently, I think that in this space Garmin's business mandate is cost cutting across the board which is why we see them leaning so heavily into gimmicks and pr imaging.
I think it's easy to pretend we're all similar people with comparable socioeconomic positions because we spend time in the same digital space but again, believing that would be a error in judgement. We should not blindly assume we know who we are talking to on the other side of the screen because the fact is that we have no idea. For example, is James Reeves from the post above an accomplished attorney with an informative and entertaining youtube channel or a seasonal accountant for H&R Block? We can't know... Thing is, some of us actually are qualified to judge the performance of a business division without having first created a multinational company, just as some of us need not have held office in order to critique the performance of one who holds it. Note this is not a hard and fast rule but a generally apt heuristic.
What I can say is that I spent $1500 on a watch that I thought would be fun to integrate with my avionics package and what I received was a second tier product with inferior OS support as well as limited watch face and app compatibility... Because the background image is different. If you knew how much money putting glass like the G1000 into a cockpit might cost, you might also understand the expectation that an affiliated wearable might have. Garmin failed in this regard and looking back through these forums, including the D2 Mach 1 Pro - they have been failing for some time.
I am saying, based on what I see of Garmin's macro behaviors is that they are not 'stupid', it is more likely that they are simply not generating sufficient revenue from their consumer division to justify investing what is necessary to fix what appear to be a decade of declining leadership and innovation in this space. Like Blackberry and Palm before them, they are uncontested only due to circumstance, not quality or interest.
I expect that to change within five years and I think Coros is best positioned to capitalize on Garmin's complacency. Time will tell of course, but that's my impression at this time.
The now deleted post was replying to you, immediately before you deleted your own and thus removed it's context. I thought that marked a de-escalation of sorts. I guess not. It seems that no matter what is said, all you've got in your rhetorical toolbox is more ad hominems. That's too bad because it reduces the quality of the interaction to near zero. On social media, it's called forum sliding and it's used for narrative control; it's exclusively the realm of low effort trolls and activists engaging in bad faith so let's take it down a notch, okay? Nothing I wrote was particularly sensational so there's no need to get emotional about it. Fact is, I'll still own the Tactix despite returning the D2, I just won't be buying another if Garmin continues on it's present course.
