Okay, I'm going to give this a shot from the top...
Do you mean you took the effort to make it compatible with the Particle ecosystem, or did you simply copy&paste it? Although the Particle products are promoted as being 'Arduino-compatible' that does not mean you can use stuff one on one. There is a lot of different hardware involved that requires a different approach. The 'code-compatible' part is due to the same language that's being used.
Most, if not all, libraries are contributed by the community. There isn't a governing power in place to check all of them. I'm pretty sure 'Arduino-land' has its fair share of malfunctioning libraries as well, so it wouldn't be fair to expect anything different from Particle. That's not to say we aren't trying to make sure that most libraries work as well as possible.
To put it bluntly:"guess what, it's not an Arduino". A bit more sophisticated: there's so much more going on on this board than your good old Arduino that you have to account for. Different hardware, Wifi, network connectivity, and so on. It's similar to Arduino, it is, however, not an Arduino, so please don't try to treat it as such. There are a lot of similarities, for sure, but also quite a few (important!) differences which you can't simply ignore.
I'd agree with you on the fact that it's not as fast as it used to be. This will be looked at in the (hopefully not too distant future). Updating firmware, and adding/removing firmware has never been an issue for me. Do you have any steps we can take to reproduce these issues so we could try to fix them?
That's a rather unhelpful statement. If you could tell us what isn't working, we might be able to help you out.
I can compile firmware with it, save it to my computer, and upload it to my devices, I'm not sure why yours wouldn't be able to do that.
If I'm not mistaken, that's being worked on. Currently, some other projects have priority, but I'm sure this will be addressed. Also, some background server rework is necessary in order to facilitate this.
No one is forcing you to use it. If you don't like the software they're providing, feel free to use your own toolchain. There are steps available which you can follow which will allow you to compile locally. Also, the Cloud isn't something you must use either, you're free to use the local cloud, or just use tcp/ip instead, should you have any obligations against that.
Rather than complaining about it, providing detailed information might help give us clues as to where things may have gone awry. Saying 'this doesn't work' won't help getting it to work. Rather, tell us what issues you're facing, and preferably a way so that we can reproduce them. If you find anything in need of improvement, do let us know what, and ways it can be improved, rather than:"this sucks".
That's like going to a car repair shop and saying:"my car doesn't work, but I'm sure it has something to to with the gasoline, so yeah, I didn't bring my car. Oh yeah, you'd better fix it!". It just doesn't work that way. I mean, feel free to not post it if you're certain your code is flawless, but then don't expect us to be able to help you out.
Okay, let's go crazy here, and try to imagine something, albeit it might be very unlikely. What if it is your code that's malfunctioning? Because if it weren't, we'd have a couple of thousand people with the exact same issues, which I personally haven't encountered yet. I could be wrong though, and you've got perfect code. But then again, it wouldn't hurt sharing that, does it? We might be able to learn a thing or two from it.
This is generally known as "whining for the hell of it". Going as far to say this platform 'sucks' because you happen not to like aspects of it seems a bit harsh.
If complaining is your main goal of being here, I wholeheartedly suggest you find an alternative means of getting rid of your frustrations. There'll be a conflict of interest otherwise. You see, our goal is to help people. Meaningless complaining isn't helping anyone, and doesn't contribute much more than a bad atmosphere. Again, If you've got issues with something, or see room for improvement, then let us know in a constructive way, rather than just bashing about it.
If you do have serious questions you require help with, then by all means, ask away, that's why we're here.
Yeah, if only this were an actual Arduino... but it isn't. And it's not as simple as just:"let me paste this stuff here, and BAM, MAGIC, it works!". There are hardware differences which are not to be underestimated, so please don't take them as lightly as you appear to do currently.
Well, if that's what you're going to compare against, try running it on your toaster, see if it'll run that. If it doesn't, it's probably the toasters fault? You can't just magically expect everything to work just because it did on an Arduino. Try running Windows on an Arduino, 'cause, you know, it works on my computer, so why wouldn't it work on an Arduino?
I wouldn't know, since you haven't given any steps to reproduce this. If you manage to do so, we might be able to fix this? Browser incompatibility springs to mind, but that's just a random guess. Without more details, there's little we can do.
Is it in listening mode (blinking blue), or have you got a Serial.begin() in your code somewhere? If not, than it's not surprising that it doesn't work, since no Serial connection is opened to begin with. Also, installing the drivers as per the docs shouldn't hurt either, although I doubt that's the cause.
I haven't yet had any issues with the forum whatsoever. Could it be that Chrome crashed for any other reason? Are you using an experimental version perhaps? Can you reproduce this, or was this a one-time thing?
In light of keeping this forum a nice place to be, I've changed your topic's title as well, since that didn't contribute anything meaningful. Please have a read through the above, if you haven't yet done so, and return with some to-the-point questions.