I get your frustration and I feel the same way often. Although these are just consumer products and in the long term aren't worth fussing over, the truth is we are in fact protected by consumer laws etc, and we did indeed pay for these products with our own funds. I even went on a rant in another thread here about the poor networking performance defeating the purpose of buying this TV for me in many ways, as I'm almost better off buying an Nvidia Shield for a TV that's supposed to essentially have one built in.
I think it's important to keep in mind that for the vast, and I mean absolutely overwhelmingly vast majority of people who buy these TVs these things are absolute non-issues and the most important thing is to have stuff working day to day on unmodified sets, and I'm sure many of the calls that Sony support gets are simple goofy things that might be due to user mistakes, as opposed to people who for example buy the Nvidia Shield, which can be called an enthusiast product, no?
I think it's unfortunate that these TVs, which seem so neat on paper and are imho quite affordable and with good picture quality, end up lacking in unfortunate and unexpected ways, like perhaps the shortsightedness of using megabit and not gigabit LAN (especially in the high end sets, come on), the mediatek drivers being so mind numbingly poorly optimized (the wifi for example is atrocious), the silly programme guide check or whatever it is that's causing the VPN bootloops, and the fact that the TVs turn on from standby all the time to send all kinds of user statistics to Netflix, Sony, etc, which process supplies power to the board and of course causes any peripherals, hard disks included, to switch on and off a hundred times a night, presumably shortening their lifespan.
Maybe in the end the best solution would be to not go for these smart tv all-in-one products, and let a TV be a dumb screen to which you attach whatever you want. And I do want to mention, though not as an argument in favor of Sony in these dealings, that the Philips Android TVs I've tried have been so much worse, bogged down with a lot of unneccesary crap, so at least in that regard it could be worse than what Sony has provided -- if you went in blindly and bought and Android TV trusting both/either company.
Hopefully future sets will be tested to also comply with the needs of advanced users (which they are supposed to anyway), making sure stuff like VPN works and understanding that people have things like home servers etc and obviously if they have Android on their TVs and decent enough chips as well users would want to take advantage of it.
Then again I could be wrong and maybe Sony are just plain lazy and don't care about making their products work to afcftual specs, and we should be wary of buying from them if we expect to utilize them fully.
