Does everyone here realize how incredibly huge Apple's audio business is? Their Wearables, Home, and Accessories business did $30B last year. If AirPods are even 1/5th of that category, that's a $36 business.
For comparison, Sennheiser did about $1B in revenue and Bose did $3.6B.
Are are absolutely huge and capable of surpassing every single company in terms of product and audio quality.
If we're going with the whole human centered design approach here the writing doesn't sound as though you were thorough enough in the research, analysis, and synthesis.
There should have been some guideposts here: who were the power users? what did they love? who were the huge detractors? what was their big issue? how did ContractBeast fit into the ideal world? how were people splitting their work between the old system and ContractBeast? were there network effects for the old system?
Yeah we can look at some sort of short term win and long term gain framework, but it's pretty reductionist to a) only depend on that framework and b) not be able to come up with any solutions to fulfill short term wins.