Is sleep tracking on Apple Watch really this bad, or am I doing something wrong?

We have a baby and a toddler, and I don’t remember the last time I had 5 hours of uninterrupted continuous sleep. Instead, my nights consist of several intervals of 1-4 hours of sleep, and the time of being awake, between them, struggling to fall asleep again, varies greatly. In total I usually manage to accumulate anywhere between 3 and 7 hours of sleep during night. And if I get a rare chance to compensate some of the sleepless night time by dropping in another 1-2 hours in the afternoon, that means a lot!

For all of those reasons, sleep tracking is one of the most important smart watch features for me. My first watch was a cheap Xiaomi model that offered very limited set of functionalities and had a lot of issues… but one thing it did really well was to recognize when I fall asleep.

I recently bought Apple Watch SE. It offers so much more than my old Xiaomi, and I was happy with my purchase… the first day. But then I wore it to bed for the first time. Nothing. No sleep data at all in the morning. Then I read I should set up sleep schedule, which is just pointless in my case… or set Sleep Focus mode before going to bed. Uhm… ok. And finally, I got it to detect some of my sleep during the night. So I thought - ok, I just need to remember to set Sleep Focus manually before sleep - not ideal, but at least something. And I really didn’t like the fact that when I wake up during the night it will not show me any info about the sleep time so far, but I have to wait for the morning… but ok, I’ll just have to accept that. Then a few nights later - again no sleep data at all! Battery was fully charged, the strap was not loose, Sleep Focus was on… just no sleep was detected. A couple of nights after that - the same! Then one morning it showed sleep data when I first woke up, but thankfully I was able to catch another hour of sleep… which was not added to the total after I woke up again! Then I found somewhere that the watch will not detect a sleep interval if it is under 4 hours! Wtf?! Whose brilliant idea was that?!

So I finally had to admit - my new Apple Watch is just unusable for tracking sleep in my case. The solution - I now switch back to my cheap old Xiaomi watch before I go to sleep. It detects my sleep intervals flawlessly, it shows them right away… and all of that on a device that costs almost nothing compared to the Apple Watch.

So, can Apple really not sort out and fix this? Is it really that bad, or is there something I am missing?