Exchange 2013 - the Good, the Bad...

Just wrapping our Exchange 2013 migration, and the more we get into it, the more I see that 2013 might have just been an afterthought for MS...as in "who cares about on-prem, when we can move customers to Office 365?"
Here's a quick list of the good, the bad, and the just plain annoying regarding Exchange 2013:
 
The Good
 
1. Exchange can run on some slow, low-range gear. Its not much of a resource hog, so the actual mail performance is pretty good. That being said, I've run Exchange 2010 on some slow storage at pretty large organizations and it never once squawked.
 
2. IP-less DAGs are the best thing about 2013. Changing NIC's, losing DNS, pretty much any networking "event" never effects the DAG - it just keeps on humming.
 
3. RPC/HTTP for client connectivity works very nicely. During DAG failovers and other connectivity issues, clients reconnect in roughly 20 seconds.

4. No more Public Folder database, which means they can be part of the DAG and made highly available.
 
The Bad and mostly Annoying
 
1. IP-less DAGS, while being awesome, don't work with most backup solutions...yet. Most backup suites aren't updated to NOT rely on the DAG VIP or CNO, which IP-less DAGs don't have.
 
2. The EAC (Exchange Administration Center) is terrible - it clearly wasn't thought out during the planning phase of Exchange 2013.
 
  a. It takes a long time to find anything, because there are so many sub-sections, within sub-sections (and sometimes within sub-sections).
 
  b. The ability to right-click would cure this problem fast!
 
  c. Only listing 500 objects in places like recipients, and then forcing you to navigate to different pages to find what you're looking for is just plain stupid...yes I know there's a search, but it doesn't work for everything.
 
  d. The EAC is super slow...slower then the 2010 EMC, and I didn't think that would be possible.
 
  e. The EAC almost never matches what the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) says. For instance, mailbox quotas in EAC say 1GB, while EMS says 400MB (the previous settings before migration).
 
  f. Changes to things like adding IP's to internal relays with multiple CAS servers, you have to add those IP's on each machine. If you have a lot of IP's, and some admins who don't know PowerShell, that's quite a lot of busy work.

3. There are some deprecated cmdlets in the EMS, which used to be very useful. For instance, Get-LogonStatistics doesn't work anymore; it throws an error. Now you actually have to ask the user what version of Outlook they're using, wait for them to not know how to find that info, tell them how to find it, and then remote to machine to find it yourself...c'mon MS, that's annoying!

4. The lack of documentation on both TechNet and around the web is seriously lacking. There's plenty for O365 though, go figure.

5. From an end-user's point of view, OWA isn't as user-friendly...it's prettier though. It's harder to find things like OOF, Inbox Rules. etc. You shouldn't have to go to "Options" to get to those things.

6. No more Public Folder database. It’s not a database, it’s a mailbox and it can only be active in one database. If you have multiple sites; they’ll all be connecting to a single mailbox for their PF's...if that's across slow links, there will be a performance hit (as if PF's weren't slow enough already).

7. Your Load Balancers need to be set up perfectly. I know this isn't 2013 specific, but I've never had as many co-existence problems as a 2010 to 2013 migration. 
 
  a. Outlook password prompts and "your Exchange admin made changes, close and reopen Outlook" prompts constantly
 
  b. Mobile device sync failures, and taking days to pick up the new server settings
 
  c. OWA redirect problems because of the way 2013 proxies to 2010
 
  d. Internal relays failing, even though authentication never changed from the 2010 environment
 
  e. Shared mailbox permissions don't "travel", in that if a user is on 2013 and the shared mailbox is still on 2010, they can't access it.
 
  f. Owners of distribution groups who have been migrated can no longer manage those groups.

8. You cannot enable or manage UM (Unified Messaging) on Shared Mailboxes; you have to use a Regular User Mailbox, and add Full Access for users. I think is for two reasons: MS wants you to license those mailboxes for UM, which means more money. And since Exchange 2013 EAC is built off of Office365, where Enterprise Voice is not  available, MS didn't allow for Shared Mailboxes to support UM.

So, the bad list is longer than the good list. Maybe MS will make some better changes in upcoming CU's, or maybe 2013 is just a stepping stone build to 2016, like 2007 was to 2010. All in all, I'll probably get over most of these problems when we totally cut over and our 2010 environment(s) are decomm'd, but for now I'm not overly impressed :)