I have seen good and bad micro sockets, I have never seen one that looks as durable as the average mini socket.
It was a strap put across the top to keep them from ripping off the pcb. It's been in Samsung phones since the S3 I think, others also used it. It doesn't stick out when you look at it.
Mini was a lot easier to insert the right way around right away, and it actually always stayed firmly in place instead of just wiggling around and slipping right out.
I agree with orientation, it's a hassle.
Regarding durability and retention, honestly, some of this is due to age and USB at the time. Mini was out before micro, early USB had better connectors since they hadn't figured out how to cheapen them as much. More important, when Mini B was popular there was a $5 charge to use it so the companies that tend to cheapen the heck out of connectors hadn't gotten really wrapped their grubby hands on it yet. It was low volume and too expensive. By the time the fee was lifted and micro came out there was a sudden influx of money to make a cheap connector, primarily from cell manufacturers.
I've got mini and micros with bad sockets, however the micros led a much more difficult life, more insertions and just general abuse. My most common use for Mini B was usually on an external drive where I was concerned about damaging the drive so it was handled with much more care. The micro however was used on a phone on a regular basis and people just got more complacent.
Rated life span (insertions) per USB spec.
A - 1500
Mini B - 5000
Micro B - originally 5000, never reinforced versions 10,000
C - I can't find documentation but I believe it's 10k or more
Weren't there type A to type A cables designed specifically for file transfer between two computers? I have seen them, and read cursorily into them. Why anyone would ever want to transfer between two computers through USB 1-2 when you could just use ethernet is beyond me, but I suppose home routers/switches may not have been as common then either.
They used a box in the middle to facilitate it and it wasn't cheap. You have to isolate the system power supplies from each other and there's some other data conversion going on in there somewhere.
The ones I saw were USB 1.1 or 2.0, while 2.0, the only benefit I can see was it didn't require networking (home networking was still somewhat rare), you still needed some computer knowledge to use which made them an oddity, at least to me and like you said, for the price, it wasn't worth it.
What is surprising is that they're still making them.
I just went to look them up and they are still being made and sold, with USB 3.0 even. Who has a computer these days without wifi, much less two computers? It would be awesome if the speeds were good but the one I looked at was able to act as an internet connection to the second computer which leads me to think all of these have always just been two nics tied together with a network auto config script. That would explain the price of them and the fact that no brand names bothered.