The mis-alignment trope is well established, be it in the corners or at the center, but there are bigger design sins:

- wastefully large "zero KB" text to signal nothing

- poor text legibility due too light of a gray color - if you don't want people to read that text, don't add it! Or hide behind some tooltip or something

- tiny font size with a lot of space wasted, that's bigger than small margins

- the useless brightness of persistent window controls, they are way too common and unimportant, especially for keyboard users that never even click on then

> I know my machine's getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window?

I don't see how age matters here for such primitive low cost operations, so no, it should be instant on a machine older than yours

> Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work.

This continues to be a very frequently highlighted epic fail across various Apple platforms. I wonder, is there any substantive explanation on why it's so bad for so long?

> Perhaps there's hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today.

Not really, it's more like it has years of memory loss leading to a bunch of bugs like in this blog to be forgotten and the marketing tag taken over. So definitely there is hope, just wait a decade...