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> but my fairly non-technical wife has a Cricut and the few times I've wanted to use it I had absolutely no problem

This is this is one of those situations of knowing their audience. The machine is nice and does some impressive things for the price. Their software works fine for the people that the hardware was designed.

I too have designed things in Illustrator and imported them into their software. It took a bit of getting used to, but I've designed retail packaging with cuts and scores so I can create custom boxes that I was not able to find premade and having the custom design made was too expensive. Could the design software be better? Of course, but that software would be out of reach for their target audience. So instead, I've stopped holding it wrong, and work within its constraints.

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> Their software works fine for the people that the hardware was designed.

HARD disagree. Go look at all the youtube videos of craft people finding insane workarounds to try and get it to do things outside of the narrow lane of accepted uses.

One small example. It has a pen plotter mode. But it has no way to

1) generate single-line text (like a Hershey font) - the only text mode is outlines.

2) fill outlined shapes.

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Well, you need a font that is single-line by design. Then it works just fine. There are some single-line default fonts, too. For filling shapes, there is no automated cross-hatch or anything, that's true, but you could create such a pattern in a vector program.
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As I said:

> impossible to use the machine except in a very narrow set of ways.

Congrats, you were using it within that narrow set of ways.

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