liudr:
What I wish they had were function calls wifi.lib_version() and wifi.firmware_version()
^^This
I can't agree with the other points in your rant though. The only problems I have had with my official WiFi shield, are of my own making. It was very unreliable, until I read the manual properly and stopped trying to use the SPI pins for I/O. My initial attempt to port Apache to the Arduino didn't go too well either. I am used to coding for full sized servers. Trying to overcome the challenges of processing indeterminate length strings, in just 2KB of RAM, has usefully reminded me how much protocol stacks are taken for granted.
Yes, I would agree the shield can appear to be fragile. Any whiff of a buffer overrun and it will crash. Whether there are other WiFi shields which are more resilient at similar cost, I can not say. I have lost count of the number of times I read good things about something, only to find lots of bad things which had not been mentioned, after I shelled out.
I really disagree with the bad because it's open source propaganda. Perhaps because I spend my day job running business critical web, e-mail and application servers, built on open source platforms. I also have to deal with the commercial brands and they are, in my opinion, far worse when it comes to releasing unfinished products, relentless patches and imposing upgrades of dubious benefit.
With any Tom, Dick or Harry able to fork off their own prototype, publish it on Google with claims it will shift your paradigm, there are bound to be a few open source lemons around to avoid. Such does not prevent World beating projects being open source projects. I am too knew to Arduino to say which it is but I am extremely impressed to date. I have no problem paying just a little more to support the Arduino project, above the cheapest boards I could find listed on e-bay.
YMMV.