It actually does get solved with other systems. I can tell you that because I worked within Google platform for over a decade in the same industry, add with differs companies/environments and probably invested a total of 1-2 hours collectively in thought and setup deliberately for that system. It worked, and it improved over time.

Especially when outlook does things like give a notification that you've replied to a thread on a given date, but clicking that text doesn't jump to that mentioned reply AND the reply in question is not shown in line with the message you responded to.

I'm the last person to champion Google, but in comparison, Gmail handles conversational email threads intuitively and without deliberate setup or skill required. It follows the logical human expectation for the course of a natural conversation between parties. It also collapses less recent messages and surfaces more recent, relevant ones on longer term threads. But everything is logical and accessible.

I have a list a mile long of little features that have blocked me day to day in outlook mail and calendar that break productivity flow compared to gmail. They require deliberate setup and a learning curve to get something that feels close to usable and even then, glaring omissions in the product.

If your work isn't very complex and you don't communicate often (i.e. You're coding all day or reading/responding jira tickets), I can see you having that take. If you're forced to interact with these systems constantly though, it is objective trash. It's stale and afraid to change due to enterprise malaise and already approved workflows with said broken system.

I fucking hate it every day.