rustle,
re Points 1 and 2, this is exactly the problem. A government monopoly leads to blind indifference to the needs of consumers and they've now made the problem worse by not publishing the A1 / A8 data anymore. If they opened up the field to competition with commercial providers, people would quite rightly go elsewhere, but as it is AIS just sits and delivers a crap, unacceptable service three months after launch. In the commercial world they would be out of business.
If they publish the data, I am sure that after all this furore someone would take the challenge and deliver us a commercial service. If the alternative is no NOTAMs or the rubbish AIS service, I would be prepared to pay a few quid a year, as would most members of this forum I suspect.
QDM