Apple has not meaningfully changed the Apple TV (the hardware) experience for over a decade.
I think the last big change they made was making it so the remote was easier to not get upside down, or something.
I have two young kids and I also watch premier league football. I think this makes me a power user of sorts of Apple TV since I (ridiculously) have subscriptions to almost every service:
Paramount+ has Paw Patrol and Champions League
HBO has The Pitt
Peacock has Lego City Adventures and some Premier League Games
Apple TV (subscription) has For All Mankind
Netflix has Arrested Development and Aquanaughts.
I occasionally subscribe to YouTube TV but I mostly go out of my way to avoid doing that. I also have Hulu, since you cannot buy HBO and Paramount+ without them giving you Hulu for reasons unknown.
Oh and I have Amazon Prime Video but I don't think it costs me anything.
I buy movies from the Apple (TV?) Store, since I enjoy owning movies I love. Finally, I do buy a few kids TV shows (Paw Patrol) from Apple since its so insanely annoying having to figure out how to download episodes across multiple apps — so I prefer to just buy a few seasons as airplane entertainment.
Putting aside the absurdity of how many services I pay for, the thing that is awful is the user experience.
Apple TV^2 App
I cannot rely on the Apple TV app (not the hardware nor the streaming service but the, er, Apple TV TV app.) because:
some services, like Netflix, do not allow their content to be indexed by this app
the Apple TV^2 app doesn't know what content I actually have access to within these streaming services, so for example, it's always offering me an episode of Paw Patrol to stream on Hulu but I do not actually have the right subscription to watch it — and obviously, since Apple is Apple, I cannot even upgrade my subscription in the Hulu app due to Apple regulations.
So I mostly rotate through all of these ridiculous applications trying to find the content I want — in fact what I mostly do is just watch content I already know that I can watch, Arrested Development rewatch number ten here we come.
The Remote
The Apple TV remote is so frustrating because of their user interface paradigm. If you want to return to the home screen of Apple TV, you mash the back button, if you want to step "up" a step in the UI — you press the back button. If you're browsing content in Apple TV^2 and wish to access the search option of the side bar, you have to click all the way to the left of the screen, even if you're looking at 23 episodes of content.
You'd think there would be a nice iOS remote application — like maybe instead of Airplaying an episode from the iOS app, it magically makes the Apple TV play it — but nope, the iOS TV app is totally independent. If you're a maniac you can AirPlay from the iOS TV app to the Apple TV hardware.
There is a software Apple TV controller you can access, but its exactly the same as the stupid physical remote. Like you click a software "up" arrow on your phone and it takes that action on the Apple TV. I can't begin to stress how abundantly primitive this all feels.
The dumb experience
Sometimes, when I am watching Premier League, it'll give me a notification that my favourite team scored and asks me if I want to watch the game — smart! except of course that I am watching the game already.
There's no meaningful recommendations or thoughtfulness to the experience, there is no way to queue content up to be played, or adjust auto-playing experiences globally — it's just a collection of janky TV apps assorted on a home screen that is 2005 calibre. Have you tried re-arranging your Apple TV icons?
Different apps
All of the Apple TV apps behave completely differently — some media scrubbers during playback have a "restart episode" option, and many others do not. Some allow you to fast forward or rewind, and others, bizarrely do not.
Similarly navigating the application is totally different — Amazon Prime TV versus Netflix versus Paramount Plus — all of these apps are completely different, which makes sense from a developer point of view but the role of these apps is identical for the consumer.
Some apps make you log in with a password, others let you enter a code from your phone, and so it goes — they're just all totally different.
The missing standard
Rather than allowing developers to make their own special pony application, Apple should provide the user interface. I think its okay for these developers to make their own applications, but it should be within a standardized interface.
Does Netflix or Paramount care if their settings or user switcher icon is in a standardized place? Surely not.
AppleTV^3
I can stream TV from YouTube TV and/or Hulu — and by paying for this functionality I can also record shows and even access a huge library of pre-recorded shows. I question why Apple doesn't offer this functionality within their AppleTV experience, natively.
It's less about watching live TV (although that would be great) and more about giving users a single credential that would not only unlock live TV but could also be used as the primary identifier across other applications too, for example I can subscribe to Paramount+ via YouTube TV — and then I can log into Paramount+ using my YouTube TV credentials. I'd love to have this as an Apple service instead, it would even allow apps to automatically probe my login to understand if I have access to their shows, allowing me to view their content without having to log in endlessly.
Hopefully Apple becomes more imaginative with their TV experience — it feels like Apple is trying to create it's own walled garden that will eventually lure people away from using other apps (be it live TV or other streaming apps) but that feels like a near impossibility — hopefully Apple accepts that some collaboration can help everyone here.