I think Msft should hire a few more market oriented people rather than pure tech product manager to balance a product team. Customer needs/satisfactions are same important as the tech advantages (which sometimes could be advanced in theory but useless in practice).
You haven't understood a thing I've written. I'll try one more time. Software is often structured in layers. In the case of WP, the lowest layer is closest to the hardware, whereas the topmost layer represents the OS apps (calendar, messenger, etc.). There may be any number of layers in between.
To reuse my previous analogy, if WP were a house, imagine the top layer being the roof (user facing features and UI), and the bottom layer being the foundation (kernel). Yes, there are many layers/floors in between, but we'll ignore that. Now imagine you get commissioned to build that house. What do you start with? The foundation or the roof? Wanting to start with the roof obviously sounds quite ridiculous, but that is exactly what you are calling for in software terms.
If you've completed the house, then you are free to remodel any of the floors you like. You can even freely prioritize roof improvements over everything else if so desired. However, if you are building a brand new house, which is exactly what Microsoft did during this last WP8 development cycle, then you don't have that luxury. You can't just willy nilly dabble a little on the "consumer side" (the roof) and then dabble a little on the "tech side" (the foundation). The foundation (and all the floors in between), must be completed first.
The problem was simply that Microsoft needed to build a new house with a solid foundation, while most people wanted nothing but a reroofing. The problem has nothing to do with Microsoft having too few "market oriented people" like you suggest.
But still, I look at what Nokia is doing with WP and I compare with MS: the first was (and still is) a company leaning towards bankruptcy, the second one is a revenue machine... Yet, Nokia ported its navigation software from Symbian to WP in few months, and has been regularly updating it since then, and along with it's developing a whole lot of really well crafted apps, while Microsoft struggles to give us a calendar with a weekly view.
And do you remember how Nokia fared with Symbian? Do you remember that the main reason Nokia gave up on Symbian, was that they couldn't evolve it fast enough, despite having assigned roughly 6000 people to Symbian R&D?
Microsoft is now doing a majority of that really difficult software engineering work, which Nokia previously did themselves. This effort on Microsoft's part is what allows Nokia to do all those things you mentioned in a timely fashion!
Both companies want to make their customers happy, but Nokia has the freedom to devote almost all of their software engineering staff directly towards that goal. Microsoft is in a much more difficult situation, because they must worry about app compatibility (WP7 vs. WP8), security models, unified API's across W8, RT and WP, and literally hundreds of other things most users have no idea even exist. In this last iteration, Microsoft was simply forced to care primarily about those things which consumers don't. Unfortunately, there weren't any engineering resources left over (of around 500) to work on much else.
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