[fjtorres]

People keep talking about all the "great" added features that Kobo offers yet those "great" features don't seem to be helping them move the needle in market presence.

Could it be that those amazing features are akin to the number of cup holders in a minivan? Something that looks impressive on the specsheet and will be useful to a handful of outliers but hardly a must-have for the vast majority of buyers, who are more interested in the vehicle's reliability, fuel consumption, quality of dealer network, etc.

Different companies have different design criteria generally based on the profile of their target customer. Amazon quite obviously is targeting the mainstream fiction ebook reader rather than specialty markets in education (tried it with KDX and thudded badly) or hobbyists impressed with extensive feature sets. Instead, they focus on stability and reliability and on the backend infrastructure. Kindles are, and always have been, primarily storefronts for their ebookstore.
Judging by the results, their customers approve.
Those that don't can and do go elsewhere.

Sounds like an open marketplace to me.