I don't know why you'd expect better from UX, Google has had notoriously terrible UX for as long as I can remember. Off the top of my head - blogger/blogspot, youtube, hangouts android app, google voice android app, gmail settings, google maps (especially the android app), etc.
My favourite example of poor, almost outright user-hostile Google UX is adding a contact to the Android address book.
(For the uninitiated: there is no yep/confirm/save element in the add-contact dialog. You have to press the back arrow -- the biggest text on the screen is the heading Add new contact, but that doesn't react to touch!)
That reminds me - gmail hangouts vs inbox hangouts vs hangouts hangouts vs hangouts android - contact sharing is essentially useless. No way to search for a contact in your contact list from ANY of those except android. So if I want to text someone I haven't in a while, I need to first text them from my phone before having access to the conversation thread in web clients.
I'd be interested to hear more about your reasoning, since it seems very flimsy and opinion-based. Developers at the time were excellent with the technologies available then.
