Hi Paul. I hope you are well.
My experience is slightly different but I absolutely share your views and below is a little bit (actually, a lot 
) of what I did to overcome some of the shortcomings. I am now fully retired and have left my customers to press on, as they are all now pretty much self sufficient, but I experienced some very similar feedback to yourself. What I did to move these to positives and stay with Suite were pretty basic but here goes.
Firstly, I created a customised version, as I am sure we have all done for customers, but I did this at the outset, before I had any. Out of the box, even today on version 8.x, I regard Suite as a toolkit with a huge amount of functionality but which needs to be identified and properly harnessed.
So, using my 40+ years of experience in mainly the enterprise space, I created a front screen menu layout that made sense to the sales and marketing process, using terminology and logical function flow that you would expect from prospecting through to billing. This was as much for me to identify gaps and see how best to fill them, which I think I did listening to the prospects and their needs and feedback. It is all in there but sometimes wasnāt obvious to me, let alone a prospect.
In regards to email, I did a lot of āmessing aboutā as all of my customers are MS houses using Outlook. After a few weeks of trying to get a smooth integration, even trialling some of the chargeable plug-ins, I gave up. My marketing pitch to prospects was to stay with Outlook and I use a simple (free) transport package to sync calendars both ways but with Outlook as the primary email client. This was actually viewed by all of my customers as a good thing. A bit of a cop-out but they didnāt see this as an issue. Learning a new and very clunky email service was not viewed as a benefit but they all knew Outlook so well that this was a comfort factor and it was their Corporate platform, fully supported etcā¦
Marketing - campaigns and all of the associated functionality are pretty basic and the editor(s) available within the package are positively from the stone age in my view. Most of my customers were streets ahead of where Suite is even today. They have used it for mail-out campaigns and basic tracking, which works quite well once set up correctly, de-duping and correction of their database and sending what they view as basic marketing collateral, compared to what they can produce with other products. Some of the other CRM solutions do allow integration of many of these so that you can keep this within the family, so to speak. This area needs improvement to allow better content creation and more flexibility but the hard work has all been done. More a case of developers not really understanding the business function that they are developing for, in my view. This can be easily solved, as there will be willing clients out there happy to provide the input.
I use Google Charts for all of the visual reporting and dashboard tabs as well as a couple of other external products occasionally, as the graphics in general are pretty basic in Suite. All of my customers wanted more than I could produce with the standard system but Google Charts does a great job but as you know, requires some technical knowledge to integrate and customise. I put the time in on this to generate business and individual forecasting and performance reports mainly, plus some trending and historic analysis. This started with a tip from someone on the forum way back, which I took to the next level as a business tool which was key to all of my customers. This is another area where Suite could use a major boost as the competitors you mention are just more savvy in producing and presenting tools that have sex appeal to the C-level Sales and Marketing directors, VPs and dare I say even accountants. This wouldnāt need a huge amount of effort with some thought and planning and there are some free tools out there such as Google Charts, that the developers could harness and produce a simple front end for, which would make a massive difference.
Social Media is not such a big thing for my customers as none are B2C, all B2B so their Social Media focus tends to be on the marketing of their messages, as well as products and services but this is something that could be integrated into the marketing modules with some thought.
This is already a tome but also meant as a constructive view, as this is, like yourself, based upon real customers and their business needs. Personally, I think that Suite is a great product with masses of capability and with a few carefully targeted developments could really push back at the Hubspotās of this world.
For customers who are sick of a six figure annual SalesForce bill and Hubspot can get up there quite quickly as well if you use their enhanced functionality, Suite is a major, major cost saving, as we all know. However, a bit of gloss added to the front end at relatively small cost would make a huge difference in how it is perceived in an evaluation, and allow a real targeted marketing challenge to those customers with the big bills.
I have gone on far too long but hopefully this will send the right, positive message to support your points.
