I've never had any of the issues in the post. I know iCloud sucks for developers (seems like iOS 8 is rectifying that a bit) but for me as a user it's been very reliable. Am I just lucky? Is the experience detailed in this post very common?
P.S. You don't have to use iCloud for anything. iOS supports Google Calendar/Mail, Dropbox has an API for file storage dev can use and with the new document extensions it's easier than ever to use. You choose to use iCloud of the devs of your favourite apps choose to use it.
I had several games where savegame syncing was enabled by default (on the top of my head i remember Rayman Jungle Run) and when the sync fails, the game won't start, even after disabling iCloud.
Not necessarily. Sync--particularly sync which can involve changes at the same time by different devices--is hard. A lot of devs just don't want to fully implement the required mechanisms.
P.S. You don't have to use iCloud for anything. iOS supports Google Calendar/Mail, Dropbox has an API for file storage dev can use and with the new document extensions it's easier than ever to use. You choose to use iCloud of the devs of your favourite apps choose to use it.