Mysterious, built-in roadblocks

My husband's phone is synced to iCloud. It wasn't his choice, exactly. His phone ran out of room at some point, and it prompted him to start storing to the cloud. He, maybe in a moment of distraction, hit accept, and now his photos live up there, and on the phone. But...apparently if he deletes off of his phone, it disappears off of the cloud as well. And the images on his phone are automatically saved as lower-size versions, to conserve space. So, the only way to get the high resolution photos saved to his local drive is to methodically download groups of photos from the cloud to his computer. Because, there is no "download all" from iCloud. Why? It seems like such a basic function. I have to believe there's a reason for this, other than it never occurred to them. But what could it be? I see this with other Apple software. For instance, Pages. Why would you have a "duplicate" option, instead of a 'save as'? If you want to create something new from the older file, you have to select "duplicate", then "save" then rename the file, then if you close your original file, you are asked if you want to "revert changes". What does that even mean?

Point is, certain functionality seems to have been worked out in other software to the point where there are ubiquitous, functional solutions for things like saving a new version of your file, or closing with or without saving changes, or having the option to 'download all'. Is Apple willfully ignoring precedent? To what end? Does it somehow benefit them to keep these things confusing? (Don't even get me started on Insert/Choose... I mean really, WTF). Why reimagine a system that's been worked out fairly nicely everywhere else?