I'm not sure what scanners you had before these but for the most part, the scanners are actually trying to make complex radio programming easier. But of course, they add complexity to already complex radio systems.
Try adding even more complexity to Uniden and Whistler scanners if/when you opt to buy or use a Unication (Gx) pager and/or a DMR radio. If you think programming a scanner is a pain, you should try these.
Looking waaaaaay back to my younger days, my father had an old VHF tuner radio to listen to the city fire department. Reception was terrible because there where so many systems packed into the same 154 mhz frequency range that they all clobbered each other when they transmitted. Of course, it wasn't fully those transmitters causing the problems, it was the basic and simple nature of the radio we were using.
Then we move forward to the high tech "crystal" scanners - I bought a Bearcat IV 8 channel VHF/UHF scanner and a few crystals to hear police and fire. Nice. So much better than the tuner unit we had previous to that. However, it became difficult to find crystals for the frequencies I wanted to monitor (wish we had Amazon back then!) and I found myself constantly swapping out the crystals since I could only have 8 installed at any given time.
Wow - the good (?) old days..... limited frequencies in use with dedicated users, poor adjacent frequency rejection/filtering, very few "repeaters", analog static, lucky if you could hear much without a rooftop antenna.
Over the years, systems became more and more complicated as jurisdictions switched over to trunking systems... systems that were in place long before any scanner was available to monitor those systems. I remember when my county fire department switched from a 3 channel analog VHF "system" (not so much a system but really just 3 channels on 3 different frequencies) to an 800 mhz trunk system... 800 mhz? I bought a new 800 mhz capable scanner but it was impossible to listen to any conversation since the trunk system would place each part of the conversation on any one of up to about 16 shared frequencies each time the user transmitted! Ugh! That scanner went back pretty quickly as it was useless.
Over the last 20+ years, more and more systems came online and thankfully, consumer scanners that could track trunking systems came on the market. In many cases, those scanners for the most part required manual programming (they may have had some programming software but it was terrible) and could only monitor a very limited number of systems. And, more so then than today, you really had to understand how these trunking systems work before you could successfully program a scanner to monitor them.
We are very lucky these days to have scanners, databases of systems, and programming software that allows most users to find and program their scanner without alot of major hassle. However, that doesn't mean it's just "plug and play". Unlike using other things like iPods that have simple single standards (some call "closed systems"), scanner users still should (need) to know about different types of systems and how they work to be satisfied with their performance. Listening to a scanner isn't listening to XM Radio - these systems are very complex - and the scanner vendors have done a pretty good job trying to insulate users from most of those complexities by gradually moving to on-board nationwide databases which allow users to select a system, import/install it and listen in a matter of seconds (but this depends upon which model scanner you have).
Everyone who uses one of these scanners and the programming software will find frustrations at first. However, the more you take the time to understand the systems you are programming as well as the scanner you are programming (and it's programming software take actually makes it much,m much easier), the more satisfied you will be as a user.
As for the software to program any scanner -- it changes over time and of course is different from one vendor to another. As with the scanners themselves, this all comes down to consumer choices. After years of use, I still find things I both like/love and hate in any piece of software - not to mention that it can be frustrating switching back and forth between them. Still, I'll take these frustrations any day over years past where I was manually programming trunked systems through a keypad.....
I guess it comes down to this - we're humans and no matter what we have, we (will) always want more - which is ok because it helps to drive innovation. Be thankful we have more than one vendor that provide competition. Without it, consumer suggestions and requests would almost certainly fall on deaf ears.
Even if the radios program themselves through telepathy in the future, we'll still be unhappy with some aspect of it - more so if there were only a single manufacturer.