Full ack on that last part. I got a new laptop from my employer a few months ago and the angle is so wide, I have trouble not having something like a drying rack or other unprofessional stuff in the background. It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.

That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.

(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)