I don't disagree with you, but at the same time:

• They threw Alex Ionescu out: the guy that actually wrote the majority of they only kernel that actually worked;
• Martin Fuchs fired: the guy that made the explorer and a ton of GUI components. His code was later on bastardized by everyone else causing the issues you were told about;
• ... and many others.

They had competent people making the thing happen, then they decided to push them away and eventually replace their code with Wine backports and whatnot.

There are still a few pieces of software that require Windows and it would nice to have the kernel portion combined with Wine.

To be fair, if Microsoft was able to create WSLv1 without a kernel and it run just fine, why would Wine not be able to do the same? :) No drivers yes, but the software (including GUI stuff) run just fine and that's not the case with Wine + the mainstream Windows' software.