Sometimes the invisible hand gives you the finger; I'm willing to wager that in a lot of these cases you end up with massive barriers to entry, and so once a company gets shuttered or pushed out competitively it will take years and years before a suitable replacement appears.

Not that I have any good ideas on how to make the subject better.

It would just weird me out. I'd arrange everything so that communal bills are paid proportionally, i.e. you make twice as much as your spouse, you pay 75% of the rent, and everything else stays separate.

I hereby propose api.gov, where your fancy little JSON structures lets you decide what you think is relevant.

At my last job, we had biweekly status meetings that sometimes slipped to once a month?

I have to barely report once a week.... but this certainly isn't BigCo as far as number of employees go.