In a way, maybe. Roon originally had only local files, there was no streaming integration, so the whole thing was not an issue. Then they added streaming, but you can’t put a 100 million tracks database into people’s NUCs. Thus, the idea was born that you may consider the streaming services like a record shop, where you pick albums and take them home to add them to your personal library.
Maybe at this point one could have done a complete redesign instead, and maybe there could have been a more elegant solution for the fundamental problem than the one we have now. So, in this sense it may reasonably be seen as a design flaw.
However, I maintain that the fundamental issue is in the necessary split between personal, local library and streaming service content one way or another. And that was not fundamentally solvable at the time (the cloud and people’s internet connections were far from the necessary level) and IMHO still are not (cf. the uproar when Roon tried to require an always-online Roon server). Refer to this post detailing what’s necessary to just run a full text search on the streaming service databases:
In the future, if everyone has really always-on internet, running each user’s personal database in the cloud would bring immense advantages, such as simplification for users and the ability to scale up immense resources to run a Focus query on all of Qobuz/Tidal. And Roon has expressed an interest in this when it becomes possible. Until then, we’ll have to live with some compromises.