Interesting. My experience has been better than that; for example I'm using CloudMagic for email and it works a whole lot better than the native Google app for mail.
I'm definitely speaking in generalities but for concrete example, Theweathernetwork app is hopelessly broken despite its rock solid brand. Many todo list widgets I've tried are useless and un-configurable. Nearly all of my widget except for gmail/gcal go stale. I'm perturbed by the lack of context awareness widgets have, mostly just serving as a hotlink to the app for basic operations. The fact that I can't make a custom tiled layout of bookmarks an annoyance (wouldn't it be nice to have a metro style layout just for news bookmarks but not be forced in to it?). I want to like widgets though. I'm sure there are good ones out there. I just haven't found many yet.
Can you expand on this a bit more? Nearly all of my widget except for gmail/gcal go stale.
What do you mean by going stale? Would you want the widget to always have the latest information, whatever that may be, without having to click some update button? I think some people would dislike this as it would increase data usage.The fact that I can't make a custom tiled layout of bookmarks an annoyance (wouldn't it be nice to have a metro style layout just for news bookmarks but not be forced in to it?).
If I understand correctly, each bookmark widget would have the latest or most popular story from a particular news source?