What's the worst contemporary connector you could have on a piece of hardware?

Mini-USB and Micro-USB were annoying.

SCART : ) Extremely useful, you wouldn't want a TV without it at the time, but impossible to plug in without perfect alignment* (and orientation precise to a degree or so!) - not possible with the back of the TV against the wall.

* I believe in connector world the technical term is "gatherability", i.e. how much the connectors can be misaligned and still be able to connect. SCART gatherability was not great.

It is really annoying when companies like Apple use a standard connector but use a different pinout from the standard.

I don't like those high-density 100 pin board-to-board connectors on the Raspberry Pi compute modules. I've bent those individual copper connector pins far too many times now.

RJ-45 connectors where the connector release pin faces down. My finger are just to fat to get between the wall and the connector to release them. Many a blue streak of words standing on a ladder reaching up to take one cable off among ten other connections. I've put my fingers on a diet if I knew it would help.

That's one of my favourite connectors : ) but you're right, they are often squashed together.

Plus it seems unnecessary, they could have had space for a slightly larger pitch connector.

In my old age with poor eyesight and arthritic hands, I find that the smaller connectors are the worst problem - always have been to some extent.  The worst is the u.FL connector that is used to connect parts on PCBs to external antenna cables.  It is a pain to connect and disconnect those, especially if the PCB designer doesn't provide enough clearance to other components to enable use of a tool.  It is a miracle, but I've never damaged one of those yet.  My other issue is with some of the flat ribbon cable PCB connectors like those that are used to connect cameras and displays (CSI, DSI).  The plastic piece that is used to clamp the cable end is very fragile.  And I have broken a few of those.

My other peeve that is not related to connector design but to standards is the 2mm JST connectors that are on small Lithium battery cables.  The RC toy/model standard and the one used by vendors like Adafruit have the + and - connections reversed and not many boards are protected against incorrect polarity.  I am very careful and have never damaged anything, but I have many of both styles of batteries and mating cables/connectors.

Exactly!

IMO, the Olimex boards get it right.

www.olimex.com/.../

Just curious, do newer TVs for the European market still have SCART?