The Prime is just an Expensive Toy

[Claudio L.]

(12-08-2019 04:47 PM)medwatt Wrote:  ... the Ti-89 can do more than the Prime simply because you can find a package for almost anything on the Ti-89...

... There's an app out there that can do just that ...

I think these 2 short quotes summarize the reason of your frustration. Your expectation wasn't met because there simply isn't an electrical engineering community built around the Prime.
This is not a deficiency on the device, it's a sign of the times. The HP50g and TI89's fully compatible ancestors were born at a time where when you bought a computer and turned it on, all you saw on the screen was a prompt and a blinking cursor. You were forced to read, educate yourself first, then use the machine, and by "using" I mean starting your BASIC/Pascal/C interpreter/compiler and coding your own programs or using somebody else's hand-coded programs. Same thing for calculators: people read, got educated and started creating their own programs, sharing them with a large community of professionals doing the same.

Fast forward to after 2010: People expect to use a device using nothing but their intuition. Read? Learn? how antiquated. They also expect the device to have an existing online repository of programs already coded and working to solve their every problem, because nobody bothers getting their hands dirty and coding anything anymore. This is a generation of "downloaders", that expect everything to be already done and served on a silver platter in a matter of 2 clicks.
The HP Prime was simply born too late to develop that kind of repository because nowadays people want that repository to "simply exists" as if it took no effort to create one. It has no backwards compatibility to any "ancestor", so there's no big repository.

This is ALSO the reason why everybody wants Python. No, Python is not superior to any other language. Once you learn one or 2 coding languages you realize they are all very similar, and with a couple of hours to familiarize yourself with the syntax you could be using ANY language in no time (including PPL). Then why Python? Because... they want to download the code already written! People nowadays can't be bothered to port a simple subroutine from one language to another, they just want to download it and have it running on a single click. They don't want Python to code in Python, merely to download existing Python code and run it. And because Python is popular, the repository is large.

So don't try to explain this user the pros and cons of a device. Unless he gets a big repository where he can download his app to do Bode plots and Fourier transforms with an intuitive UI he will not be satisfied. It's just a generational thing.