They used to charge serious money for it, that would have allowed them the budget to fix enough of the bugs that SMS is now pretty damned good.

Culture is also a large part of it, it's embedded in telcos to such a degree that I and my parents use rather expensive and fairly slow AT&T DSL because its rock solid, every one of my friends and family who use cablecos for Internet have a tremendously higher rate of problems. Cablecos come from a culture where a customer or neighborhood losing connectivity for hours or a day or two wasn't the "end of the world".

Agree, 100%; silicon valley has 0 clue how to run support, and as a result their user experience is awful.

And what good are new features of you can't even send a message in the first place? The solution was disabling RCS completely or, hard resetting the phone (uninstalling and or wiping messages did not fix anything).