VOICEOVER and Keyboard focus issues

I notice this in Mail when reading digests of email list activity. There's often a list of subjects near the top. Find a subject of interest and jump to that email text using VO+F. If you then use up and down arrow, text cursor focus is nowhere near the VoiceOver cursor. It's back at the top of the digest, where it was just before you did the VO+F.

This needs a feedback report. But it has the distinct odor of permanent behavior.
I don't have a fix. There is a toggle for this in VO Utility, "Synchronize keyboard focus and VoiceOver cursor". When that's checked, VoiceOver decides to ignore it in some very specific circumstances.

For the first thing, from my testing this has partially or totally been patched in 15.4 beta 2. The workaround is to use vo+arrow keys.

Does anyone remember the last time macOS just, worked? I think that might've been around 2017 or so.
The pre-SNR era.

VO+F is the VoiceOver find feature. In my example, I was using it to find text buried deep within a Mail app message body. It moved VoiceOver focus to the text I was searching for, but failed to move text cursor focus, even though I have selected the VO Utility option to keep them synchronized.

VO+t / VO+f for you rarely works when it should be working. For example try doing it on the comment/article section of this site or anywhere else. Nothing in pdf although the find next/previous bold, italic, underline, font change... do work. So I have to find something, but to know that I can find it I have to know that it's there in the first place. See the headache coming? :)
But yeah, and trust me on this one, macos sequoia is far far far better than what I experienced with ventura, as a new mac owner and macos user. I could apologize slightly for polluting the comment space here before June 2024, but macos was truly unusable for a new user as each voiceover script and way of doing thing had its bug(s), its workaround(s) and bugs for these workarounds... and I am hardly exaggerating here. I felt safer and more productive on the first developer beta of sequoia than the latest stable version of sonoma. Glad to see that you at least have not been disappointed like I was and you can still have fun with it which I've only started to feel quite recently in retrospect.

Only for the finder save dialog in safari (and probably other browser) when downloading a file, and I still have to do more testing with it to be sure of my claim.
Don't be surprise if one day you find that the keyboard cursor is in safari and voiceover's in pages for example. Very rare but it has happened to me just enough to know that it's a very clever bug and difficult to reproduce.

I was still lost in my teenage period back then thinking oh wow I discovered this new shiny thing called nvda and I love espeak! Seriously though reports on applevis seem to confirm that something happened around 2017-2019 and accessibility started to declining, but I'll let older folks who probably had credit cards when I did not confirm this.
For your quick nav bug, I have made a post about it 1-2 weeks ago, basically try to disabling allow typing in text field checkbox related to quick nav and this should solve this problem although you'll have to interact in text fields to type. I personally rarely use any of those because how unstable this is and always use capslock vo modifier plus whatever 13 keys combination I need to perform the desired action, at least it's much more reliable. If you want to develop better fine motor skills you can either learn tabla (in my very biased opinion best indian instrument in the world) or learn how to use voiceover on macos, at least you have a choice! 😂
Ventura was an untold psychological experience by apple on blind users. Few passed the test.

At least you understand this one while nobody except one random dude on linkedin understood my heavy sarcasm about voiceover and vim/emacs parallels.

I made the switch from JAWS to VoiceOver around 2014. I recall VoiceOver being very different from JAWS, and VO felt a bit awkward, but I don't remember all these inconsistencies we're seeing today.

I distinctly recall new flakiness appearing with each new release, stuff unrelated to features being rolled out, and never mentioned in the release notes. This has been going on for a long time, but I couldn't say for certain when it started.

The M1 chip came out in 2020. Seems plausible that engineering focus that might otherwise have been devoted to quality assurance were instead consumed with making sure the OS ran at least usably on both Apple and Intel architectures. But I should stop. I could speculate until the heat death of the universe and never know for certain what is going on at Apple.

I'd say for me, macOS began accumulating more accessibility bugs, or at least accessibility bugs that weren't being addressed, around OS X 10.10 Yosemite (released in 2014), and OS X El Capitan (released in 2015). In my experience, Yosemite introduced several bugs that made VoiceOver quite laggy, in addition to various other quirks with new features that year, and while the performance issues were largely resolved for me with the release of OS X 10.10.2, a little over three months since the initial release in October 2014, many of the other bugs remained unaddressed.

The next release, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, brought several new features to VoiceOver, such as the ability to use Caps Lock as a VoiceOver modifier, as well as the ability to change VoiceOver's grouping behavior, but it also introduced a number of bugs, the vast majority of which remained in the software until the next major release, 10.12 Sierra, released in 2016. Since then, no major release has been as buggy or inconsistent for me; however, I think Apple still could improve its performance in consistently and expeditiously fixing bugs in macOS throughout the release lifecycle, and thoroughly documenting expected behaviors so users and developers have a clearer picture of how things are supposed to work.

I will agree with Tyler that Yosemite was a nightmare, when it first launched. However, toward the end of its lifecycle, in other words before El Capitan was released, Yosemite actually ran really, really well.
Each release of macOS either fixed or broke something, or rather I should say, fix one thing, and broke two other things. However, in my experience, the absolute worst was Catalina. Catalina brought the original version of the SNR bug, although back then it wasn't Safari not responding, it was safari is busy.

I mentioned 2017 because, if I am not mistaken, that is when High Sierra came out. In my opinion, that was the last, most stable, version of macOS. Anything after that is a lesson in patience and frustration.