>The (forced) merge of my YouTube account with Google account was one of the most painful experiences I've had to undergo and I still suffer from issues and annoyances that has brought about.

I know people bitch(ed) about that but come on, it makes a ton of sense from both Google's and end-user's perspective to standardize all Google services under one account. Anybody (here or elsewhere) would have made the same decision.. Their fault is that they waited as long as they did.

Google+ also makes some sense because it does tie services like GDrive, blogs, photos, docs, videos (youtube), and chat together. The problem there was that they got spooked by Facebook and tried to copy it exactly (e.g. the real name policy, which was always stupid but they did it because facebook did it). It was a typical Microsoft thing to do; look where the puck is, and not where it's going.