How iCloud/iCloud for Windows work?

Can some one help me to understand how Apple iCloud service works?

I have almost 200 GB of images and videos stored in the iCloud. This images are stored from different devices and I really would like to have an offline copy of it on my PC synced the same way as dropbox, google drive or any other decent cloud service. But guess what, this is impossible!!!

Why Apple, why???

iCloud have an option named "Download new photos and videos to my PC". Why do anybody needs only new photos? And what does new photos even mean? A week, a month, a year?

After you turn on this stupid feature it downloads photos and videos recently added to iCloud. I have uploaded some old photos taken in 2010 and by Apple iCloud's point of view these are new photos which I find wrong.

But, apple has an inovative solution, you can click manually to download photos you like, you have an option to download by year or even all photos. OK, I tried that and realised that this option downloads everything, even photos that are already on my PC (so called new photos), but these are sorted in folder by year - which is very clever but why other "new" photos are not sorted too?, and why I have duplicates? And guess what, if you delete some photo from iCloud this is not synced so you have to delete it on every device.

If you have a large library and you have run out of space on you C drive, guess what, you cannot cancel the download. What? How can you run out of space if your download folder is on some other drive that has enough of space. Well, apple iCloud caches all this data while downloading on C drive C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Apple Inc\CloudKit holds enormouse amount of GB. That's just great apple!

Do you know what happens if you click "Download photos - all" again? Well, it downloads everyhing again making duplicate folders for each year (2007, 2007(2), ...) instead of just refreshing the existing folders which I find not ok.

Do you know what happens if you would like to share some of your photos to your friend (not apple users)? Well, first you have to creat an album, and not any kind of album, you have to create a special kind of album named shared album (You cannot share your existing albums that you have created). And do you know how this works? It uploads all this pictures again to the icloud shared album and on slow connection it runs forever. And if you don't have on you iPhone all the originals (to save space on the precious iPhone) thay have to be first downloaded. You have pictures and videos in the iCloud and cannot create an album that references the same photos, it duplicates it, downloads it and reuploads it. And another anoying thing about it, it has a limit on 5 min video. If you have a longer video it doesn't work!

Can anybody help me to understand this, maybe I have misunderstood everyghing, but from my experience this is how I see it.