Apple, why is it so fiendishly difficult to import audiobooks?

When importing audiobooks on CD into iTunes we have to jump through hoops to get them to appear in the Audiobooks section and play on all devices. Why is this so hard?

Surely the Gracenote database should know if a CD is an audiobook. It seems to know the genre is spoken word, but for some reason iTunes doesn't set the media type correctly.

And why the weird rules about the track names? They usually result in imported audiobooks appearing mixed up and messed up in the default iTunes view. You have to select the author to see the books correctly, or write a script to change all the track names.

If the disk and track numbers are correct, why do Apple require undocumented conventions to be followed in order for audiobooks to be displayed and played correctly? This seems unnecessarily unfriendly.