Precision M4800, Windows 1909 repeated failure, RANT

I have been trying to get this update to install for weeks now on this 2013 released Precision M4800 mobile laptop.  Each solution attempt gets progressively more invasive, elaborate and risky and still fails. The last failure was an in-place upgrade and there isn't any information from any of the Microsoft created solutions, including this one, that is helpful.  I'm going to update a few drivers, which should be irrelevant, from Dell for this machine, restart, and try to apply the update again, but I'm pessimistic because the M4800 is omitted from the list of machines that they have tested with the current Windows Update. 

If anyone has had this issue with Update 1909 on a Precision M4800, would you please lmk what you came up with to fix it? 

This has happened before, but I've always been able to muddle through it by backing off of everything like anti-virus, external devices, 3rd party drivers, etc. but I've never had to go this far before.  It's so bad, that if my latest try doesn't work, the only thing left is to:

1. Backup my data,
2. Take a complete image backup of System disk,
3. Ensure System Recovery has adequate Restore Point Storage allocation,
4. Create a restore point (not sure if useful, but doesn't take long),
5. Wipe the hard drive,
6. Install Windows 10 Professional as Dell recommends,
7. Apply all Dell updates,
8. Run Windows Update repeatedly until completed,
9. Install Dell Updates as recommended,
10. Reinstall all 3rd party applications

But what a nightmare.  It's going to take a long time and I'm going to have to gather up all the installation kits for my apps along with all the license keys.

RANT STARTS HERE

So, what do we do?  I can't even apply a workaround, because Microsoft produces such low quality product that I have no idea what is actually failing in the upgrade.  So, like a   programmer, I'm going to have to keep trying stuff until it works and hope I don't lose anything.  Microsoft has a tendency to delete restore points or they don't work in these situations because their so-called "Wizards" those up. 

You might say "Why not just leave it alone?"  Anyone who's ever let something like this go will tell you that it festers like a boil and I'll eventually have to fix it any way.  Which leads to my Microsoft Rant

Microsoft is in complete control of the environment, I don't muck with it, just like millions, yet there are tens/hundreds of thousands of their customers who can't install this 1909 update on many platforms.  When they do contribute in a forum, their approach is generally generic and offensive where they tell you to just reinstall Windows 10 to correct it.  It's like the foreign script-readers labeled "support", who speak English as a 2nd language at your bank, cell phone provider, cable TV, etc. who casually tells you to delete your entire browser cache, including cookies and history, to solve the problem of their page.  If you want to see a real   show, go to Microsoft for documentation of how to re-install Windows 10 or the mysterious "in-place upgrade."  It's a bunch of blind-alley links where they never quite give you either a clear understanding of what's going on, nor a step-by-step process to do it so you can mitigate risk.  So, as usual, millions of us have to spend time we really don't have wading through the process of trying to fix something that shouldn't have broken in the first place because the vendor, MS, won't do it with a good dose of anxiety that you're either going to lose something important or spend countless hours just to have a functional environment.

MS forces us to keep Windows Update on.  Don't think so?  Just try and stop it until you want to apply it.  In fact, if you have any task that takes more than 24 hours, good luck, because it's just going to reboot in the middle of it and if the task doesn't have an interrupt-restart handler, you'll just have to start over.  I'm guessing there is a setting to delay update for a while, but you can not stop it.  Hey Microsoft, you can't both force us to use your buggy update then not support it and have happy customers.

I don't muck with the updates.  I take the defaults for everything, including Office installations.  Microsoft has complete control over the environment they force us to update, yet it still fails.  And, to make things worse, it doesn't throw any useful error codes that might point to a particular driver. Won't tell you why it's failing, just a cryptic, general, generally misleading, error code.  How hard would it be to log every single program run, task executed, setting changed, file moved/deleted/renamed with error logging on?  Then we could find the error ourselves and fix it, since they are too inept to do it.  And, disk space is cheap, and word can load and search big documents so even if it was a 2GB log file, at least we could see.

Microsoft is a HUGE company, the dominant force, yet they produce , bloated code that can't even take care of itself in a controlled environment.  Why can't they produce a clear log of the update that shows EXACTLY what activity failed?  They don't document anything and deploy it untested.  They don't even have a listing of all the exception codes that Windows Update throws so you can fix it.

Microsoft could become an even more dominant player for time in memoriam if they would put this basic coding effort into their products.  As it is, everyone is moving to phones and other platforms because this kind of nonsense makes a Windows PC too much trouble and they are away their dominance with the lazy sloppiness MillenialZ are known for.  (MillenialZ: A term I've coined for Millennials down through the Gen Z because it's not just Millenials).