Yep, there was an upgrade released a couple months after I purchased my truck. I applied it. It did improve things, but only to the point that I described above. It really seems like there are significant problems with the support for SD cards that impact the rest of the system. I should probably give up on the SD card and try limiting myself to the music that's on my phone.

But even doing that won't fix the crappy UI...

I have SYNC in my 2013 F-250 and it blows. It keeps trying to re-index my SD card, so I can rarely use the voice commands to play music from it, and sometimes it'll switch by itself from playing SiriusXM to playing the SD card. It's also slow to respond sometimes (probably an artifact of it trying to re-index the SD card), and the UI to select music from the SD card is cumbersome.

I guess most of my gripes are about the SD card functionality; the rest of the functionality seems to work OK when it isn't being screwed over by the SD card, but again I find the interface cumbersome to use. For example, scrolling through the SiriusXM stations takes way too many taps.

My hope is that QNX, given its history as an RTOS, will be more responsive and robust. It might even give the developers a chance to improve the UI.