Im not sure the software center being half baked is even the real problem.
One of the nice things about Windows is that you dont need a central, curated, repository for software. You can google the thing you want and just download an msi/exe of the latest stable version and, 99.9% of the time, leading back to your first point, it will just work.
What? That is easiest one of the worst parts of windows. It’s just that people are used to this dumb endeavour
Why do you think its bad? From a secruity standpoint its obviously not great, but its undeniably more convenient than running a curl command to pull in a third party .repo file, yum update and yum install to get something that isnt easily available in my base repos.
Nothing more convenient then a central “app store”. apt search, apt install is all I need. But I undersntd that people don’t like it, that don’t know it.
What’s convenient about googling for software, downloading ominous files and clicking through an install wizard and most likely installing some adware and unwanted search bars? It’s crazy people see it like that.
Even the other posters in this thread are talking about flatpak and appimage. I’ll never understand that way of thought.