You're assuming Apple had other choice other than make a Maps.app from the ground up. I don't think it's the case. All the apps that used Google's data (YouTube, Maps) just stopped getting updates after Android. It's obvious their contract with Google ended and they had to ship something. I'm sure everybody acknowledged the solution was subpar, just saying "it sucks, don't ship it" isn't a solution.
Perhaps I am being too judgmental. I have know special knowledge of Apple's corporate culture. I'm just saying how it seems to me.
I agree that Apple had to cut loose from Google and develop their own mapping. And they needed new features for the iPhone 6 launch, which gave them a hard schedule limit.
Maybe "everybody" did decide that the mapping sucked but they had to ship it. That seems rather un-Apple to me: they are obsessive about user experience and have cut features in the past when the tech didn't work. So I'm not convinced by that argument.
If they felt they were forced by circumstances to ship the maps application now -- which there's at least some evidence of, if John Gruber's information about the way the Apple/Google contracts were timed is true -- then they'd kind of be in a Catch-22. What features could they have actually cut from the Maps app? The mistakes in 3D meshes and fuzzy terrain tiles make for the biggest point-and-laugh screen caps, and perhaps they could have cut that, but that would have caused just as much screaming. And the biggest issues really seem to be with the POI database, which you can't launch without. (And which, it should be noted, isn't something that Apple built on their own; at least in part, what Apple Maps is revealing is how bad a lot of other third-party geographic databases are compared to Google's.)
As for Apple's culture, well. I don't have special knowledge of it but I live in Silicon Valley and know a few people who've worked there or continue to work there, and your description about it doesn't seem to me to be accurate. There was a great deal of respect for Steve Jobs but there was no perception that he was always right. People did in fact push back against him, and he'd often listen. (And in cases where he didn't, there's still some controversy going on.) I think you're correct to surmise that there's a lot of arrogance in Apple's culture, mind you -- but I can assure you that Google's matches Apple's ego for ego. If anything, Google's corporate culture is more smug than Apple's, not less.
The app works fine. The user experience is better than the previous with the new features (navigation, voice). It's not a tech problem.
The whole problem revolves around business strategy. Mapping data. Google monopolizes this area, and the other providers are all tied to Apple's competitors (Microsoft, Nokia).
So either they come up with their own, or stay on the hands of competitors (since mapping is such a core feature).
I wish they adopt Open Street Maps, or contribute back to it. Mapping is one area where all good solutions are proprietary and in the hand of a few, it completely sucks.
Adopting/Contributing to the project as their number one mapping foundation would be nice and would have provided them tons of goodwill. But I guess Apple also wants to use OSM together with data from other commercial sources (tomtom).
That applies to the strange, pre–iOS 6 iPhoto-specific map tiles. OSM is acknowledged in the new app's acknowledgements, but so far there are places where the Maps.app is less detailed than the basic OSM database – but no doubt this can and will get better.
You're assuming Apple had other choice other than make a Maps.app from the ground up. I don't think it's the case. All the apps that used Google's data (YouTube, Maps) just stopped getting updates after Android. It's obvious their contract with Google ended and they had to ship something. I'm sure everybody acknowledged the solution was subpar, just saying "it sucks, don't ship it" isn't a solution.