Exactly. I'm currently building in-house analytics (thanks Clickhouse) due to GA4 as well.

The only way I'm able to use GA4 in any way is with their search box + autocomplete, you can sometimes get a decent query result, then you click the three dots next to the tiny line chart, export as CSV and you get the data.

And for events, I think they want you to pay for BigQuery, so you only get some kind of aggregate count, which is useless. It'a too confusing to figure out if I'm wrong about that.

In bigger setups, all you want is a data collector and router so that you can feed the data into multiple destinations, depending on the use case. Analytics is just one. Example: https://www.rudderstack.com/ & https://www.rudderstack.com/replace-google-analytics-4-guide...

We (request metrics, author) are also using clickhouse. But we go beyond analytics to integrate performance, security, api monitoring, and errors under a single interface. We think of it as “client side observability”.

Agree on all points. It's extra frustrating because GA exposes some metrics that are hard to get elsewhere like traffic sources, organic search, accurate user metrics, live geo location, etc. The only reason I keep it activated (alongside a more flexible alternative) is because it's free.

The whole UX drives me mad.

A great example of a product built without love.

This is what you get when you hire developers to make people click ads.

Our industry generally has passionate engineers and detached product managers.

You say it as if there is a one-directional flow of information between PMs and developers.

In this case, perhaps, yes, the developers don't care and just do what the PMs tell them to do.

Engineer's Job is to carry out product's vision as faithfully as possible. Yes, can give suggestions and dispute things but engineers can't drive 100% of the product's function and if they can, what's point of having a separate function of product managers.