In my past experience, too many extensions tend to break every time GNOME Shell is upgraded and it can take a long time to get them fixed.
The GNOME developers have signaled over and over again that they're unwilling to provide stable APIs for UI customization. Being a developer myself, I can see why it's a burden, but the current situation is that it's being done anyway through unofficial extensions and users are left to deal with the random breakage.
I think Clive Sinclair was notorious for wanting products to be brought to market quickly, with pretty aggressive feature sets. They very well may have noticed it at the factory, but didn't want to do a fix because it was technically functional.
It sold on some stock of existing ZX Spectrum hardware, but mostly it sold models it developed:
* Spectrum +2 -- a Spectrum 128 with a mechanical keyboard and built-in cassette drive
* Spectrum +3 -- a redesigned Spectrum 128 with a DOS from Locomotive Software and a 3" (not 3.5") floppy drive. Dropped compatibility with 48 peripherals such as Interface 1 and Microdrives, and 128 peripherals such as the numeric keypad, serial ports, etc. Added the ability to page out the ROM and replace it with RAM, so it could run CP/M 3, also ported by Locomotive.
* Spectrum +2A, the black +2: a cut-down +3 with a cassette drive.
These were designed by Amstrad engineers and contractors, and manufactured by Amstrad. No Sinclair involvement I'm aware of at all.
Commodore just kept doing this. Just listing shoddy craftsmanship would take forever, and then we get to intentional bad decisions, like giving the A1200 a power supply that's both defective (capacitors ofc) and barely enough to support the basic configuration with no expansions, which is extra funny because PSUs used with weaker models (A500) had greater output...
